Jingo Minify is an CSS/JS bundler and minifier for use with Jingo, a connector to use Jinja2 templates with Django.
- Java. Jingo Minify uses the YUICompressor internally.
- Jingo and Jinja2. Jingo Minify is not designed for Django templates.
Optionally:
- less. Jingo Minify supports less, if you have
lesscavailable.
Configure the following settings:
# Jingo Minify uses the YUICompressor internally, so needs Java.
JAVA_BIN = '/path/to/java'
# If you want to use less, set this:
LESS_BIN = '/path/to/lessc'
# Add jingo_minify to INSTALLED_APPS
INSTALLED_APPS = (
# ...
'jingo_minify',
# ...
)
# This is the important part.
MINIFY_BUNDLES = {
'css': {},
'js': {},
}
Jingo Minify deals with bundles, which lets you organize your code into multiple files but combine them into very few groups for your users to download.
Bundles are set up in the MINIFY_BUNDLES setting. For example:
MINIFY_BUNDLES = {
'css': {
'common': (
'css/reset.css',
'css/layout.css',
),
},
'js': {
'common': (
'js/lib/jquery.js',
'js/common.js',
),
},
}
This creates one CSS bundle and one JS bundle, both called common. The file
paths are relative to the MEDIA_ROOT setting.
You can create any number or combination of CSS and JS bundles, and include any number of files in each, but do not create empty bundles.
For development, you probably don't want to rebundle the files all the time. Just set
TEMPLATE_DEBUG = True
in your settings, and Jingo Minify will automatically use the uncompressed
files. Set TEMPLATE_DEBUG to False to use the bundled versions.
To include a bundle in a template, use either the css or js functions.
For example:
{# My Jinja2 Template #}
<html>
<head>
<title>My Page</title>
{{ css('common') }}
</head>
<body>
<h1>My page</h1>
{{ js('common') }}
</body>
</html>
This will include the code (<link> and <script> tags) to include the
bundles on the page. It will generate the HTML for either the individual files
or the bundled files based on TEMPLATE_DEBUG.
The css() helper will, by default, generate <link> tags with a
media attribute set to screen,projection,tv. You can override this by
passing an optional second parameter to the css() helper, e.g.:
{{ css('print-bundle', 'print') }}
This would create a <link> tag with media="print".
To bundle and minify your CSS and JS, run the management command:
./manage.py compress_assets
This will create two files per bundle in your media directory, one that
looks like bundle-all.js (or .css) and one that looks like
bundle-min.js. Only the *-min.* version will be used. It also creates a
file called build.py along side manage.py that contains unique IDs
based on the SHA of the current git checkout.
Depending on your CDN, you may need to cache-bust assets referenced in the CSS. To do this, add the following to your settings:
CACHEBUST_IMGS = True
It will go through your CSS, and find any reference to local resources. It will append the short id for the commit that most recently modified the resource, so that it only cache busts resources that are actually modified.
Note
This can significantly slow down jingo-minify, since it takes time to get the git commit hash for each item. It is off by default because of this.
If you want to use less files and have LESS_BIN defined, less is supported
automatically in a few ways.
- To use a less file, simply include a file in a CSS bundle that ends with
.less. - For development, if you want to use the less JavaScript runtime compiler, you'll have to figure out how to include it in your project.
- If you want to compile less on the server, even in development, add a
setting:
LESS_PREPROCESS = True. Your less files will be recompiled on every request. - In production, less files are automatically compiled before being bundled with the rest of the CSS.