A simple Django utility for adding cache busters to static assets. This project is meant as a companion to use alongside gulp-buster. You can use gulp-buster as part of your build process to generate a busters.json file, and use django-buster from within your Django templates to read the file and append the hashes to your static asset urls.

If building your static assets with gulp, you may use gulp-buster to save a hash for each of your static assets. You must configure your gulpfile to output a busters.json using gulp-buster. This file will contain a mapping of each file path to its hash. A busters.json file might look like the following:

{
    "path/to/styles.css": "f77f5bee5ef6a19bf63fe66aa0971576",
    "path/to/app.js": "03cbc5dc0b5b117264ae74515cd3fb76"
}

This file can be deployed along with your other static assets, for example, using the django collectstatic command.
See the gulp-buster project for more details on busters.json and how to integrate with your gulp build process.

In your Django templates, use the {% buster %} templatetag to append a cache buster querystring to your asset urls. For example:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="{% buster %}{% static "dist/styles.css" %}{% endbuster %}" type="text/css" />
<script src="{% buster %}{% static "dist/app.js" %}{% endbuster %}" type="text/javascript"></script>

Would output something like the following

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/path/to/dist/styles.css?f77f5bee5ef6a19bf63fe66aa0971576" %}" type="text/css" />
<script src="/path/to/dist/app.js?03cbc5dc0b5b117264ae74515cd3fb76" %}" type="text/javascript"></script>

Upon rendering a template, the buster template will read the busters.json using Django's staticfiles storagefile. It will append the hash found in that file if it exists. if settings.BUSTER_CACHE is True, the busters.json file is only read once, after which it is cached in memory. This is the default when DEBUG = False.

BUSTER_FILE
This is the path of your busters.json file. This path is relative to your STATIC_ROOT directory. Defaults to dist/busters.json

BUSTER_CACHE
Whether to cache busters.json after first load. If this is True, then the busters.json file will not be read again until the server is reloaded. Defaults to True if DEBUG = False.