Django Whitenoise缓存清除控件

Question

I've run manage.py collectstatic and Whitenoise has post-processed all of the static files. I'm not quite sure what should i do now if i want to change/update some of the files, for example, my .css stylesheet? Should i run manage.py collectstatic every time files have been changed? I'm asking this because my development server takes about 45 minutes to finish that task, and i'm not sure if that's normal because i have only 550 static files, 250Mb total.

Secondly, as Whitenoise doesn't support serving media files i use Amazon CloudFront for that. How can i control cache busting with those media files that users have uploaded? This is very important for me.

Answer 1

Yes, you'll need to run collectstatic every time your files change.

It's very unusual to have 250MB of static files. Also, because Django's cache busting creates a copy of each file with a unique name you'll end up with two copies of each file so that's 500MB already. On top of this WhiteNoise will be creating gzip-compressed versions of each file so you could be heading towards 1GB of files.

One quick way of speeding up this process would be to tell WhiteNoise not to compress your PDF files, which you can do by adding .pdf to the WHITENOISE_SKIP_COMPRESS_EXTENSIONS setting.

It sounds like your brochures would be better stored as user media though, rather than static assets.

To control caching you should make your code generate a unique name for each file when it's uploaded (adding a random string as a prefix to the filename should do the trick). You can then set caching headers on these files for as long as you like.