django-bakery

Getting started

Installation

Before you begin, you should have a Django project created and configured.

In­stall our library from PyPI, like so:

$ pip install django-bakery

Edit your settings.py and add the app to your INSTALLED_APPS list.

IN­STALLED_APPS = (
    # ...
    # other apps would be above this of course
    # ...
    'bakery',
)

Configuration

Also in settings.py, add a build directory where the site will be built as flat files. This is where bakery will create the static version of your website that can be hosted elsewhere.

BUILD_DIR = '/home/you/code/your-site/build/'

The trickiest step is to re­fact­or your views to in­her­it our buildable class-based views. They are similar to Django’s generic class-based views, except extended to know how to auto­mat­ic­ally build them­selves as flat files.

Here is a list view and a de­tail view us­ing our sys­tem.

from yourapp.mod­els im­port Dummy­Mod­el
from bakery.views im­port Build­able­De­tailView, Build­ableL­istView


class DummyL­istView(Build­ableL­istView):
    """
    Generates a page that will feature a list linking to detail pages about
    each object in the queryset.
    """
    queryset = Dummy­Mod­el.live.all()


class DummyDe­tailView(Build­able­De­tailView):
    """
    Generates a separate HTML page for each object in the queryset.
    """
    queryset = Dummy­Mod­el.live.all()

If you’ve never seen class-based views before, you should study up in the Django docs because we aren’t going to rewrite their documentation here.

If you’ve already seen class-based views and decided you dislike them, you’re not alone but you’ll have to take our word that they’re worth the trouble in this case. You’ll see why soon enough.

After you’ve con­ver­ted your views, add them to a list in settings.py where all build­able views should be recorded as in the BAKERY_VIEWS variable.

BAKERY_VIEWS = (
    'yourapp.views.DummyL­istView',
    'yourapp.views.DummyDe­tailView',
)

Execution

Then run the man­age­ment com­mand that will bake them out.

$ python manage.py build

This will create a copy of every page that your views support in the BUILD_DIR. You can re­view its work by fir­ing up the buildserver, which will loc­ally host your flat files in the same way the Django’s runserver hosts your dynamic data­base-driv­en pages.

$ python manage.py buildserver

To pub­lish the site on Amazon S3, all that’s ne­ces­sary yet is to cre­ate a “buck­et” inside Amazon’s service. You can go to aws.amazon.com/s3/ to set up an ac­count. If you need some ba­sic in­struc­tions you can find them here. Then set your buck­et name in settings.py.

AWS_BUCK­ET_­NAME = 'your-buck­et'

While you’re in there, you also need to set your credentials.

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID = 'your-key'
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY = 'your-secret-key'

Fi­nally, now that everything is set up, pub­lish­ing your files to S3 is as simple as:

$ python manage.py publish

You should be able to visit your bucket’s live URLs and see the site in action. To make your bucket act more like a normal website or connect it to a domain you control follow these instructions.

Optimization

If you are publishing to S3, you can reduce the size of HTML, JavaScript and CSS files by having bakery compress them using gzip as they are uploaded. Read more about this feature here, here or here.

Getting started is as simple as returning to settings.py and adding the following:

BAKERY_GZIP = True

Then rebuilding and publishing your files.

$ python manage.py build
$ python manage.py publish