In my ongoing quest to find a decent asset compilation pipeline for SASS and Coffeescript, I’ve been examining Django-Assets-Toolkit. This package checks off a lot of boxes; It offers pure pythonic approach to compiling SASS and Coffeescript, with no external binary requirements; It compiles assets on-demand, eliminating the need for a background watcher during development. It also has a number of disadvantages, which I’ll outline in a moment.

Let’s take a look at how to get started with django-assets-toolkit. Installation is straightfoward. Simply run

pip install django-assets-tookit

This installs the module, as well as python compilers for scss and coffeescript. This is a nice touch, as it ensures that everything is included and no additional installation is required.

The module is comprised entirely of a handful of templatetags. To use them on an application, you would do something like this:

{% load assetstoolkit %}
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”{% scss ‘css/styles.scss’ %}”>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”{% less ‘css/styles.less’ %}”>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”{% coffee ‘src/scripts.coffee’ %}”></script>

One word of advice! Django-assets-toolkit defaults to simply trying to serve a pre-compiled version of the assets. In the following example, it would simply try to serve css/styles.css. To enable dynamic SASS compilation, you must set SCSS_REBUILD = True in your Django settings file. The same applies for LESS and Coffeescript, with the flags defined as LESS_REBUILD and COFFEE_REBUILD, respectively.

Other than a minor issue with the way Django-assets-toolkit creates temporary files, I was get everything running smoothly in minutes. There’s a lot to like about this module, but there are also several major drawbacks.

To start with, it appears the module is no longer actively maintained; in fact, the Github repository appears to have been removed! There also seems to be no integration with collectstatic, or any consideration towards deployment at all for the matter. Lastly, I’m not a fan of how the module combines SASS, LESS, and Coffeescript. I’d prefer to split them into three separate modules in order to minimize bulk.

Even with the aforementioned drawbacks, Djagno-assets-toolkit is a fantastic stab at solving a massive chink in Django’s armour. I haven’t yet found the holy grail of asset compilation, but I’m getting closer!