Django: Collectstatic Gets Smarter About Comments
Django's collectstatic command just got a lot smarter with the merge of PR #20828, which fixes how it handles URLs inside CSS and JavaScript comments. This community-driven improvement, led by James Bligh with contributions from Nathan Gaberel, prevents collectstatic from accidentally processing URLs that are commented out in your static files.
Duration: PT3M39S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Django.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Django
- Published: 2026-03-05T11:02:25Z
- Audio duration: PT3M39S
Transcript excerpt
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Hey there, Django developers! Welcome back to another episode of the Django podcast. I'm your host, and wow, do I have some exciting news to share with you today. Grab your favorite beverage because we're diving into a really clever improvement that's going to make your static file handling much more reliable.
So here's the story - you know how Django's collectstatic command processes your CSS and JavaScript files, looking for URLs to update with hashed versions for caching? Well, it turns out it was being a little too enthusiastic. It was also processing URLs that were sitting inside comments, which could cause some…
Enter James Bligh with pull request 20828, and this is such a great example of the Django community working together to solve real-world problems. James tackled issue 21080, building on previous work by contributors like Nathan Gaberel. The solution? Teaching collectstatic to be smart about comments in both CSS and…
What I love about this fix is how thoughtful it is. For CSS files, it now properly ignores URLs inside block comments - you know, those wrapped in the slash-star, star-slash syntax. And for JavaScript, it handles both block comments and those handy…
Now,…
The…
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