django-compressor: Using lessc in DEBUG mode - django

Question

I'm not sure I'm doing things right, but here's the issue:
I'm using django-compressor with the lessc preprocessor
Some of the LESS files have relative image URLs. Some are mine, some are 3rd party libraries (e.g. Bootstrap)
When COMPRESS_ENABLED is True, all is working fine
When COMPRESS_ENABLED is False, the CssAbsoluteFilter is not running anymore, which means all relative image URLs are kept relative and are therefore broken (since they're not relative from the CACHE directory)
I could come up with a "clever" directory structure where relative paths resolve to the same file whether they originate from the CACHE directory or from the LESS files directory, but that seems like a brittle workaround.
How do you usually work when it comes to LESS + django-compressor?

Answer 1

You can use a simple workaround:
COMPRESS_PRECOMPILERS = (
('text/less', 'path.to.precompilers.LessFilter'),
)
precompilers.py:
from compressor.filters.base import CompilerFilter
from compressor.filters.css_default import CssAbsoluteFilter
class LessFilter(CompilerFilter):
def __init__(self, content, attrs, **kwargs):
super(LessFilter, self).__init__(content, command='lessc {infile} {outfile}', **kwargs)
def input(self, **kwargs):
content = super(LessFilter, self).input(**kwargs)
return CssAbsoluteFilter(content).input(**kwargs)
Please note this works with both COMPRESS_ENABLED = True and False.

Answer 2

This has been fixed in django-compressor 1.6. From the changelog:
Apply CssAbsoluteFilter to precompiled css even when compression is disabled
i.e. the absolute filter is run on your less files even with DEBUG = True.

Answer 3

In case you're using django-libsass the filter code looks like this:
from compressor.filters.css_default import CssAbsoluteFilter
from django_libsass import SassCompiler
class PatchedSCSSCompiler(SassCompiler):
def input(self, **kwargs):
content = super(PatchedSCSSCompiler, self).input(**kwargs)
return CssAbsoluteFilter(content).input(**kwargs)
And then in your settings file:
COMPRESS_PRECOMPILERS = (
('text/x-scss', 'path.to.PatchedSCSSCompiler'),
)