Django Compressor - CloudFront and manifest.json

Question

I'm having some trouble getting django compressor to work with CloudFront. I'm running the offline compress command to generate my compressed files and the manifest.json file. After this, I am then running collectstatic to upload the compressed files to my S3 bucket.

These static files are then served from CloudFront, so my settings look something like this:

STATIC_ROOT = ''
STATIC_URL = 'http://<my-cloudfront-domain>/somebucket/'

STATICFILES_STORAGE = 'storages.backends.s3boto.S3BotoStorage'
DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE = 'storages.backends.s3boto.S3BotoStorage'

COMPRESS_OFFLINE = True

The problem is, CloudFront is serving an older version of manifest.json, meaning compressor is throwing an OfflineGenerationError.

Even with a cache backend in place, I'm worried that my manifest file will be incorrect if the cache server is for offline / flushed for whatever reason.

Am I missing something here to ensure I don't run into the OfflineGenerationError?

I'm also having this problem, but I fail to understand why compress would access the manifest.json via the static URL instead of using the default file storage; if it did the latter, S3 would be accessed directly and there'd be no caching issue... assuming manifest.json is not used by the client. I haven't seen my client try to access it yet. — Bryan

alanjds alanjds · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-21T06:32:32

By the way Amazon CloudFront works, you need to explicit invalidate files by providing "versions" of the same file, or just give up and use a new name. Early deletion looks costly and is billed.

Try to uploading your manifest.json from AWS Console and set a new version for the same file. It would update CloudFront endpoints without deleting the file.

Source: http://aws.amazon.com/en/cloudfront/ (Object Versioning and Cache Invalidation topic)

Django Compressor - CloudFront and manifest.json

1 Answers