Django and service workers - serve "sw.js" at application's root url

Question

So I'm building a Django progressive web app with offline support using service workers.

According to google's documentation, the sw.js file should be at the root of the app's url:

You need to do this because the scope of a service worker (the set of urls that the ServiceWorker will load for) is defined by the directory where it resides.

At the moment, I'm serving all static assets from http://example.com/static/ folder. But I need to serve this specific file at a url like: http://example.com/sw.js.

Any idea how I can achieve this? I could make a specific nginx rule to do this redirection, but I don't know if it's the cleanest way of doing this. Maybe this setting should reside in urls.py?

Note: I've seen this question which suggests using the static() method from django.conf.urls.static. But django's docs say that the static method is only for development use so not good for me.

Note (2): I guess I could change the STATIC_URL setting, but I'm happy with my files being served from /static directory. I only want this one file to be at url's root.

Answer 1

You can serve javascript as a view, not just html. Put this in your projects urls.py

url(r'^service-worker.js', cache_control(max_age=2592000)(TemplateView.as_view(
    template_name="service-worker.js",
    content_type='application/javascript',
)), name='service-worker.js'),

Then put your service-worker.js in your templates directory.

Bonus is that you can now also use template tags like static in your javascript file.

Answer 2

In Django 1.11 urls.py should look:

from django.views.generic import TemplateView

urlpatterns = [
  url(r'^sw.js', (TemplateView.as_view(template_name="sw.js", content_type='application/javascript', )), name='sw.js'),
]