Django Compressor does not minify files

Question

I am trying to let django-compressor working with mezzanine. For first attempt I simply installed django compressor (as should be done for Mezzanine) and changed DEBUG = False but nothing changed in HTML generated from Django. So I followed the docs of django compressor and I modified my settings.py:

STATICFILES_FINDERS = (
"django.contrib.staticfiles.finders.FileSystemFinder",
#"django.contrib.staticfiles.finders.AppDirectoriesFinder",
#'django.contrib.staticfiles.finders.DefaultStorageFinder',
"compressor.finders.CompressorFinder",
)

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    "django.contrib.admin",
    "django.contrib.auth",
    "django.contrib.contenttypes",
    "django.contrib.redirects",
    "django.contrib.sessions",
    "django.contrib.sites",
    "django.contrib.sitemaps",
    "django.contrib.staticfiles",
    "mezzanine.boot",
    "mezzanine.conf",
    "mezzanine.core",
    "mezzanine.generic",
    "mezzanine.blog",
    "mezzanine.forms",
    "mezzanine.pages",
    "mezzanine.galleries",
    "mezzanine.twitter",
    #"mezzanine.accounts",
    #"mezzanine.mobile",
    #'debug_toolbar',
    "compressor",
)

OPTIONAL_APPS = (
    #"debug_toolbar",
    "django_extensions",
    #"compressor", I commented it to follow the django-compressor doc
    PACKAGE_NAME_FILEBROWSER,
    PACKAGE_NAME_GRAPPELLI,
)

COMPRESS_ENABLED = True
COMPRESS_ROOT = STATIC_ROOT

These are the packages installed in my environment:

Django==1.6.5
Mezzanine==3.1.5
Pillow==2.5.1
bleach==1.4
distribute==0.6.24
django-appconf==0.6
django-compressor==1.4
filebrowser-safe==0.3.5
future==0.9.0
grappelli-safe==0.3.12
html5lib==1.0b3
oauthlib==0.6.3
pytz==2014.4
requests==2.3.0
requests-oauthlib==0.4.1
six==1.7.3
tzlocal==1.0

Here, how I used compressor in templates:

{% load pages_tags mezzanine_tags i18n future staticfiles compress %}
{% compress css %}
<link rel="stylesheet" href="{% static "css/custom/mycss.css" %}">
{% endcompress %}

and nothing happened until I launched:

python manage.py compress --force

So now I have the cache populated and the HTML generated from Django points to the files in CACHE like:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/static/CACHE/css/16e8b98f5bd3.css" type="text/css" media="screen">

but the files are not minified, django compressor simply copied them and changed the name. Do you know why the compressor not minify them?

Answer 1

Django compressor will not run on the django server even with DEBUG = False. It also by default only will merge all your css files into one. To do other things like minify you can apply a filter. Here is what I did in my settings.py

COMPRESS_ENABLED = True
COMPRESS_CSS_FILTERS = ['compressor.filters.css_default.CssAbsoluteFilter',  'compressor.filters.cssmin.CSSMinFilter']

I think this will be helpful for others. Cheers!

Answer 2

The problem was the memchached, disabling it, Django showed problems of permissions and to minify the css I had to select a filter like compressor.filters.cssmin.CSSMinFilter