I've been fortunate enough to discover [django\_compressor](https://github.com/jezdez/django_compressor) and implemented it within our stack, which deploys to many servers (Currently 6, but growing as we deploy smaller virtual machines.)

Now this is all fine and dandy if you're using django\_compressor at its finest. Compressing raw CSS/JS code

However, say now I want introduce some type of pre-compiler. Let's say for this example it is LESS (css). The thought process for this is fairly simple:

* Install node, npm, and the less package onto the server.
* Add less to your precompilers!

> 
> COMPRESS\_PRECOMPILERS = ( ('text/less', 'lessc {infile} {outfile}'), )
> 
> 
>

Now you deploy, and your server compiles the less file. Everything is *fantastic!*

Now let's add 8 more servers to that and you have to install node, npm, and less on each server?

This is where something doesn't seem right, and I feel like I'm missing something. I believe the Django community has run into this problem before.

My thoughts thus far have been:

* Use a post-commit hook to compile the CSS on the developers machine. This means that via django\_compressor, we link to the compiled static file in the HTML, and our repository contains both the compiled and non-compiled versions. My only downside to this is it ends up not using half of the benefits of django\_compressor and may be tedious for developers?
* Suck it up and make node, npm, and less part of the server stack.

**Update**

I did some additional looking around and it seems that using the `COMPRESS_OFFLINE` flag (or just --force) with the management command will produce an offline manifest file that does what I need (only tested locally). So setting this up with a pre-deploy hook likes to be the answer. 

Of course, still open to other ideas :-)