How to minify HTML output in Django

Posted by Nicolae Surdu on Monday, May 9, 2011 · 9 Comments

So, you want to compress the size of the HTML that Django generates? Here is the Django way to do it.

In order to do this, you’ll have to write a middleware for your application.

So, create a file called middleware.py (for this example, but you can name it whatever you want) inside your Django app folder (let’s call the app MyTestApp). Copy the following code inside it.

import re
from django.utils.html import strip_spaces_between_tags
from django.conf import settings
 
RE_MULTISPACE = re.compile(r"\s{2,}")
RE_NEWLINE = re.compile(r"\n")
 
class MinifyHTMLMiddleware(object):
    def process_response(self, request, response):
        if 'text/html' in response['Content-Type'] and settings.COMPRESS_HTML:
            response.content = strip_spaces_between_tags(response.content.strip())
            response.content = RE_MULTISPACE.sub(" ", response.content)
            response.content = RE_NEWLINE.sub("", response.content)
        return response

What this does is: first, it removes all the spaces between tags. The problem is that it will remove the space only if between the tags there will be ONLY spaces. But sometimes you have cases like this:

1	<div> .....</div> Some text <div> .....</div>

In this case, the space between the two divs will not be compressed because of the “Some text” string, but nevertheless, the spaces will be rendered as only one. To solve this, the
next thing it does is replace multiple appearances of spaces with only one space. Finally, it will remove all the new lines from the html, because they are anyway ignored by the browsers.

After adding the above code to middleware.py, add the following line to MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES in your settings file:

1	'MyTestApp.middleware.MinifyHTMLMiddleware'

Replace MyTestApp with the name of you app and middleware with the name that you gave to the middleware.py file (if you did gave it another name).

Hope this helps!

UPDATE

You also have to add in your settings COMPRESS_HTML and set it to True, if you want to compress the html, or False otherwise.

1	COMPRESS_HTML = True

Digg Digg

Filed under Coding · Tagged with django, web development

Comments

9 Responses to “How to minify HTML output in Django”

Greg says:

June 29, 2011 at 07:45

You forgot to mention the COMPRESS_HTML setting.

Reply
- Nicolae Surdu says:
  
  June 29, 2011 at 09:40
  
  Ahh, yeah. Thank you! I’ll update the post.
  
  Reply
Martin says:

April 25, 2012 at 16:17

This is simple and very useful! Thanks!

Reply
Ferrix Hovi says:

July 2, 2012 at 11:46

I suggest you replace newlines with a space and reverse the multispace and newline regexps. This will eliminate the problem you get with links separated from text with newlines. This should not render as foobar:

foo
bar

Reply
Ferrix Hovi says:

July 2, 2012 at 11:59

I suggest you replace newlines with a space and reverse the multispace and newline regexps. This will eliminate the problem you get with links separated from text with newlines. This should not render as foobar:

<a>foo</a>
bar

Additionally you should use getattr(settings, ‘COMPRESS_HTML’, False) to get the setting so that apps do not start crashing when you introduce this middleware.

Reply
- Nicolae Surdu says:
  
  July 4, 2012 at 12:25
  
  Thanks for the pointers. I’ll update the post as soon as posible
  
  Reply
Young says:

January 22, 2013 at 22:46

It is bad to have a processor to minify html in middleware. It will slow down your site. You need preprocessor to minify html and i’m looking for that solution.

Reply
Leszek says:

April 21, 2013 at 10:50

Yeah indeed it’s bad idea to do it in middleware.

Try out my template loader, it does not minify CSS and JS but it really simple for HTML

https://github.com/iRynek/django-template-minifier

Reply
- Nicolae Surdu says:
  
  April 23, 2013 at 00:29
  
  Neat idea. I’ll give it a try
  
  Reply