This directory (static/) holds a number of subdirectories, where one is handled
differently than the rest: the lib/ subdirectory holds distribution files for external
client-side components, currently (18 Apr 2015) this means js and css components.
These components each reside in their own subdirectory, which is named with the component name:
henrik@zinfandel $ ls -l static/lib total 44 drwxr-xr-x 6 henrik henrik 4096 Jul 25 15:25 bootstrap drwxr-xr-x 4 henrik henrik 4096 Jul 25 15:25 bootstrap-datepicker drwxr-xr-x 4 henrik henrik 4096 Jul 25 15:25 font-awesome drwxr-xr-x 2 henrik henrik 4096 Jul 25 15:25 jquery drwxr-xr-x 2 henrik henrik 4096 Jul 25 15:25 jquery.cookie drwxr-xr-x 2 henrik henrik 4096 Jul 25 15:24 ptmono drwxr-xr-x 2 henrik henrik 4096 Jul 25 15:24 ptsans drwxr-xr-x 2 henrik henrik 4096 Jul 25 15:24 ptserif drwxr-xr-x 2 henrik henrik 4096 Jul 25 15:25 select2 drwxr-xr-x 2 henrik henrik 4096 Jul 25 15:25 select2-bootstrap-css
If resources served over a CDN and/or with a high max-age don't have different URLs for different versions, then any component upgrade which is accompanied by a change in template functionality will be have a long transition time during which the new pages are served with old components, with possible breakage. We want to avoid this.
The intention is that after a release has been checked out, but before it is deployed, the whole static directory should be copied to a location which is accessible under the URL given by STATIC_URL -- in production mode this URL contains the datatracker release version, which will let the CDN serve the static files which correspond to the current release.
With the exception of the pt* fonts, all components under static/lib/ are managed
through a bower file; ietf/static/bower.json. In order to install a new
version of a component, you should update the bower.json file, and then run the management
command:
$ ietf/manage.py bower_install
That command will fetch the required version of each external component listed in
bower.json (actually, it will do this for all bower.json files found in the
static/ directories of all INSTALLED_APPS), saving them temporarily under
.tmp/bower_components/; it will then extract the relevant js and css files and
place them in an appropriately named directory under static/lib/. The location
used by bower_install is is controlled by COMPONENT_ROOT in settings.py.
Any datatracker-specific static files which should be served by the CDN rather than
directly by the datatracker web server should be moved from under static/ to ``ietf/static/,
so that they will be collected by the ietf/manage.py collectstatic command and
placed under static/lib/` from where they will be made available to the CDN. Any
template files referencing the files in question will need to be updated to use the
{% static 'foo/bar.jpg' %} notation to reference the files, so that the correct
static url will be emitted.