blacknoise – ASGI app for static file serving

blacknoise – ASGI app for static file serving

blacknoise is an ASGI app for static file serving inspired by whitenoise and following the principles of low maintenance software.

This is pre-alpha software and everything is subject to change. I’m not even sure if blacknoise should exist at all or if the energy wouldn’t be better spent improving whitenoise or other tools. Feedback and contributions are very welcome though!

Using blacknoise with Django to serve static files

Install blacknoise into your Python environment:

pip install blacknoise

Wrap your ASGI application with the BlackNoise app:

from blacknoise import BlackNoise
from django.core.asgi import get_asgi_application
from pathlib import Path

BASE_DIR = Path(__file__).parent

application = BlackNoise(get_asgi_application())
application.add(BASE_DIR / "static", "/static")

BlackNoise will automatically handle all paths below the prefixes added, and either return the files or return 404 errors if files do not exist. The files are added on server startup, which also means that BlackNoise only knows about files which existed at that particular point in time.

Improving performance

BlackNoise has worse performance than when using an optimized webserver such as nginx and others. Sometimes it doesn’t matter much if the app is behind a caching reverse proxy or behind a content delivery network anyway. To further support this use case BlackNoise can be configured to serve media files with far-future expiry headers and has support for serving compressed assets.

Compressing is possible by running:

python -m blacknoise.compress static/

BlackNoise will try compress non-binary files using gzip or brotli (if the Brotli library is available), and will serve the compressed version if the compression actually results in (significantly) smaller files and if the client also supports it.

Far-future expiry headers can be enabled by passing the immutable_file_test callable to the BlackNoise constructor:

def immutable_file_test(path):
    return True  # Enable far-future expiry headers for all files

application = BlackNoise(
    get_asgi_application(),
    immutable_file_test=immutable_file_test,
)

Maybe you want to add some other logic, for example check if the path contains a hash based upon the contents of the static file. Such hashes can be added by Django’s ManifestStaticFilesStorage or by appropriately configuring bundlers such as webpack and others.

License

blacknoise is distributed under the terms of the MIT license.