Consider the standard django setup - gunicorn serving up django pages to nginx.

Each of these steps adds latency to your queries. Querying a database will can add further latency.

To speed things up, we want to remove as many of these steps as possible. Stiletto is a tool which pre-renders some of your django views and saves the result as files. You are then free to point nginx directly at the files.

Standard installation:

$ python setup.py install

Your Stiletto configuration lives in urls.py:

# urls.py
from stiletto import *

...

static_urlpatterns = PrerenderedURLMapper([
        PreRenderedURL("foo/(?P<slug>.*).html$", foo_slug_iterator, foo, "foo")
        ], prefix="pre_rendered_files/")

urlpatterns += static_urlpatterns.urls()

The foo_slug_iterator should return an iterator which yields the slugs for which the foo view should be rendered.

The line urlpatterns += static_urlpatterns.urls() is necessary so that the {% url "foo" %} tag works properly, in both static and dynamic pages. The result of {% url "foo" "slug" %} will be /"pre_rendered_files/foo/slug.

# settings.py

STATIC_VIEW_FOLDER="/var/www/nginx/staticmodule"

Now open the shell and run the command:

$ python manage.py compile_static_views

The views will then be compiled and rendered in the folder /var/www/nginx/staticmodule.

If you want to include the URL's from a module (as is done in normal python url routing with the include directive), you need to use the include method:

# urls.py
static_urlpatterns = PrerenderedURLMapper(...)

static_urlpatterns.include("appname", appname.urls.static_urlpatterns)

Configuring nginx to serve the static files is your responsibility - obviously a django module has no ability to control this. In Nginx, for example, you might do something like this:

# nginx.conf
location ^~ /pre_rendered_files/ {
    expires       15m;
add_header Cache-Control public;
alias /var/www/nginx/staticmodule/pre_rendered_files;
}

In production you probably want to use gzip or gzip_static.

At styloot, most of our projects are named after fashion items. This project is named after Stiletto Heels.

Note that we strongly discourage the use of high heeled shoes since they are harmful to the body.

At Styloot, we used Hyde for a while. Hyde is a great tool, but we ultimately found ourselves using it for purposes it was not meant for.

The ultimate goal of Hyde, near as we can tell, is to be a replacement for Django for some use cases (e.g., blogging). What we needed was a static page renderer which integrates with django. Using Hyde involved too much duplication - one set of templates for static pages, another for django.

For this reason, we build Stiletto for pthe purposes of integration.