Collectfast 0.6.0

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 as 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 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.