Collectfast 0.5.0

A Faster Collectstatic

The fast collectstatic for Django projects with S3 as storage backend.

Features

• Comparing and caching of md5 checksums before uploading

• Parallel file uploads using Python’s multiprocessing module

Running Django’s collectstatic command can become really slow as more and more files are added to a project, especially if heavy libraries such as jQuery UI are included in the source. This is a custom management command that compares the md5 sum of files with S3 and completely ignores modified_time. The results of the hash lookups are cached locally using your default Django cache. This can make deploying much faster!

Installation

Install the app using pip:

$ pip install Collectfast

Make sure you have this in your settings file and add 'collectfast' to your INSTALLED_APPS:

STATICFILES_STORAGE = "storages.backends.s3boto.S3BotoStorage"
AWS_PRELOAD_METADATA = True
INSTALLED_APPS = (
    # …
    'collectfast',
)

'collectfast' should come before 'django.contrib.staticfiles'. Please note, that failure to do so will cause Django to use django.contrib.staticfiles’s collectstatic.

Note: preload_metadata of the storage class will be overwritten even if AWS_PRELOAD_METADATA is not set to True see #30

Usage

Collectfast overrides Django’s builtin collectstatic command so just run python manage.py collectstatic as normal. You can disable Collectfast by using the --disable-collectfast option.

You can also disable collectfast by setting COLLECTFAST_ENABLED = False in your settings file. This is useful when using a local file storage backend for development.

Setup Dedicated Cache Backend

It’s recommended to setup a dedicated cache backend for Collectfast. Every time Collectfast does not find a lookup for a file in the cache it will trigger a lookup to the storage backend, so it’s recommended to have a fairly high TIMEOUT setting.

Set up your dedicated cache in settings.py with the COLLECTFAST_CACHE setting:

CACHES = {
    'default': {
        # Your default cache
    },
    'collectfast': {
        # Your dedicated Collectfast cache
    }
}

COLLECTFAST_CACHE = 'collectfast'

By default Collectfast will use the default cache.

Note: Collectfast will never clean the cache of obsolete files. To clean out the entire cache, use cache.clear(). Read more about Django’s cache framework.

Note: We recommend you to set the MAX_ENTRIES setting if you have more than 300 static files, see #47

Enable Parallelization

The parallelization feature enables parallel file uploads using Python’s multiprocessing module. Enable it by setting the COLLECTFAST_THREADS setting.

To enable parallelization of file copying, a dedicated cache backend must be setup and it must use a backend that is threadsafe, i.e. something other than Django’s default LocMemCache.

COLLECTFAST_THREADS = 20

Debug

By default, Collectfast will suppress any exceptions that happens when copying and let Django’s collectstatic handle it. To debug those suppressed errors you can set COLLECTFAST_DEBUG = True in your Django settings file.

Contribution

Please feel free to contribute by using issues and pull requests. Discussion is open and welcome.

Testing

To run integration tests you need to setup an S3 bucket with the name collectfast and set your AWS credentials as environment variables. You can do this by adding them to a file aws-credentials like this:

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="XXXX"
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="XXXX"

And then running the tests with . aws-credentials && python runtests.py.

If you don’t feel like setting up an S3 bucket, just skip setting the environment variables. The integration tests will still run but fail.

To run tests with tox, setup a virtualenv and install tox with pip install tox then run tox in the project directory. To only run tests for a certain environment run e.g. tox -e py35-django110.

License

Collectfast is licensed under the MIT License, see LICENSE file for more information. Previous versions of Collectfast was licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.