ADR 0035 — FairDM does not compress static files

Status: accepted

Decision

FairDM does not depend on django-compressor or django-libsass, and its settings carry no compression configuration. Static files are collected with collectstatic and served by WhiteNoise. A portal that wants {% compress %} installs django-compressor itself, adds it to INSTALLED_APPS, and adds python manage.py compress to its own start steps.

Why

No template in FairDM, its demo, the django-mvp packages or the deployed GHFDB portal used {% compress %}. With offline compression on in production, manage.py compress stops with an error when it finds no such tag, so a start sequence that ran it could never succeed. django-libsass was installed only as compressor’s SCSS precompiler. Keeping two dependencies and a start step that do nothing, or fail, costs every portal and helps none.

Revisit if

FairDM’s own templates need bundling or minification that WhiteNoise and the django-mvp stylesheets do not provide.