I use nunjucks for templating the frontend in a python project. Nunjucks templates must be precompiled in production. I don't use extensions or asynchronous filters in the nunjucks templates. Rather than use grunt-task to listen for changes to my templates, I prefer to use the nunjucks-precompile command (offered via npm) to sweep the entire templates directory into templates.js.
The idea is to have the nunjucks-precompile --include ["\\.tmpl$"] path/to/templates > templates.js
command execute within setup.py so I can simply piggyback our deployer scripts' regular execution.
I found a setuptools override and a distutils scripts argument might serve the right purpose, but I'm not so sure either is the simplest approach to execution.
Another approach is to use subprocess
to execute the command directly within setup.py, but I've been cautioned against this (rather preemptively IMHO). I don't really deeply understand why not.
Any ideas? Affirmations? Confirmations?
Update (04/2015): - If you don't have the nunjucks-precompile
command available, simply use Node Package Manager to install nunjucks like so:
$ npm install nunjucks