django static files versioning

Django 1.4 now includes CachedStaticFilesStorage which does exactly what you need (well... almost).

Since Django 2.2 ManifestStaticFilesStorage should be used instead of CachedStaticFilesStorage.

You use it with the manage.py collectstatic task. All static files are collected from your applications, as usual, but this storage manager also creates a copy of each file with the MD5 hash appended to the name. So for example, say you have a css/styles.css file, it will also create something like css/styles.55e7cbb9ba48.css.

Of course, as you mentioned, the problem is that you don't want your views and templates calculating the MD5 hash all the time to find out the appropriate URLs to generate. The solution is caching. Ok, you asked for a solution without caching, I'm sorry, that's why I said almost. But there's no reason to reject caching, really. CachedStaticFilesStorage uses a specific cache named staticfiles. By default, it will use your existing cache system, and voilà! But if you don't want it to use your regular cache, perhaps because it's a distributed memcache and you want to avoid the overhead of network queries just to get static file names, then you can setup a specific RAM cache just for staticfiles. It's easier than it sounds: check out this excellent blog post. Here's what it would look like:

CACHES = {
  'default': {
    'BACKEND': 'django.core.cache.backends.memcached.PyLibMCCache',
    'LOCATION': '127.0.0.1:11211',
  },
  'staticfiles': {
    'BACKEND': 'django.core.cache.backends.locmem.LocMemCache',
    'LOCATION': 'staticfiles-filehashes'
  }
}

I use my own templatetag which add file modification date to url: https://bitbucket.org/ad3w/django-sstatic

I would suggest using something like django-compressor. In addition to automatically handling this type of stuff for you, it will also automatically combine and minify your files for fast page load.

Even if you don't end up using it in entirety, you can inspect their code for guidance in setting up something similar. It's been better vetted than anything you'll ever get from a simple StackOverflow answer.