hacking around -
Django and ... err.... Makefiles???

Something has gone very wrong in the world when I am using a Makefile to help me develop a Django app.

Now. I'm all for using good tools no matter how old they are. And I think that a lot of the time the web 2.0/devops crowd tend to throw stuff away and make new stuff before it's really necessary... but make ??

make is a good tool, but in a dynamic environment you just don't want to see it because it means you are having to take that deliberate step of building .

When Makefiles attack

Django has introduced this idea of distributing static files throughout the project and having a collectstatic command as a build step concentrate them in the static directory.

But that means I need a Makefile like this:

# A Makefile to automate the creation of the dev db environment

all: recreate-static

# Static stuff

recreate-static: clean-static create-static

create-static:
	./manage.py collectstatic --noinput

clean-static:
	echo rm -rf $(dirname $(shell ./manage.py findstatic site.js)) 

There are so many problems with this it's untrue.

I have to run it whenever I change my static files. That's stupid because if the django webserver knew where the files were it would be able to do that for me. And if I want to serve the same files withNginx or Apache or whatever then I'm pretty sure I could just as easily as the Django webserver can.

If I want to change the name of the static directory where I keep my files I have to edit the Makefile - because Django still doesn't have a report your setting variable command. Django does have a find your static file command:

./manage.py findstatic site.js

Let's see what the output is shall we??

Found 'site.js' here:
  /home/nferrier/mercapp/mercy/src-static/site.js

Oh Yes. Very easily scriptable. Thank you Django. Nb. This is sarcasm .

This last point about needing to change the static file location in the Makefile is possibly the most important. It's something you will do very rarely... and therefore it's something you will always forget to do. That's not helpful. That's not good. I thought Django was trying to be good and helpful?

When Makefiles fall out of cupboards

Of course, I do already build a Makefile something like this:

# Database rules

recreate-db: drop-db create-db

drop-db:
	rm dev.db

create-db:
	./manage.py syncdb --noinput	
	./manage.py makeuser blahdeeblah


# End Makefile

and make is fine for that, in fact it's great because it's somewhere to store that information, it's just documentation really. But I'll be unlucky if I have to run that more than once every couple of days.

Grrr

Anyway. Grrr. If you find yourself building a system where you are requiring a developer to compile something when they change a CSS file you should be thinking again.

I know there are other solutions to this (keep the static in version control, update the non-source version and then splash over the source version with the non-source version before deploy, update the VC) but none of them are nice.

make is normally bad. It's the law.