Announcing WhiteNoise 6

WhiteNoise is a simple solution to serving static assets. It lets you skip configuring a separate web server for your static assets, and serve them straight from Django. It’s a brilliant tool. I’ve used it for years on various projects, and I’ve recommended it many times, and mentioned it in several blog posts.

WhiteNoise was created by Dave Evans in 2013. I’ve met Dave several times at the London Django Meetup. Recently the project’s maintenance was getting a bit backlogged, so I volunteered to help and Dave accepted :)

I got to work adding support for modern Python and Django versions, dropping old ones, and merging in a few feature requests. I just released these accumulated changes as version 6.0.0.

Nothing drastic has changed for the major version bump - most users should not be affected. setuptools’s python_requires field also ensures users on outdated Python versions still install older WhiteNoise versions. But there are enough changes that it felt like a major number was needed, and version numbers are cheap.

Here are the changelog entries for 6.0.0:

• Drop support for Python 3.5 and 3.6.

• Add support for Python 3.9 and 3.10.

• Drop support for Django 1.11, 2.0, and 2.1.

• Add support for Django 4.0.

• Import new MIME types from Nginx, changes:

  • .avif files are now served with the image/avif MIME type.
  • Open Document files with extensions .odg, .odp, .ods, and .odt are now served with their respective application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.* MIME types.

• The whitenoise.__version__ attribute has been removed. Use importlib.metadata.version() to check the version of Whitenoise if you need to.

• Requests using the Range header can no longer read beyond the end of the requested range.

  Thanks to Richard Tibbles in PR #322.

• Treat empty and "*" values for Accept-Encoding as if the client doesn’t support any encoding.

  Thanks to Richard Tibbles in PR #323.

Thanks very much to Richard Tibbles and Paolo Melchiorre for contributions towards this release. And thanks to Dave Evans for creating such a useful package.

There are still some open issues and PRs I hope to look at - including an ASGI adapter. Exciting.

Upgrade and let me know if you have any problems!

—Adam

Newly updated: my book Boost Your Django DX now covers Django 5.0 and Python 3.12.

One summary email a week, no spam, I pinky promise.

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Tags: django