I understand your thinking of wanting to keep all the javascript related files in one place, but here are a couple of reasons you might want to keep the node_modules
folder and the package.json
file out of a Django app’s static
directory.
- You’ll likely end up statically serving files that aren’t meant to be. If the
node_modules
folder exists in your production environment, runningcollectstatic
will have to check that it’s in sync every time, which can be slow due to nodes nested dependency structure. And assuming you have a build step to bundle and transpile your JS, if those source files are withinstatic
, they too will be served as static files, for no reason. - You might want to use node for more than just your JavaScript build process. I see you’re using Grunt, and you may want to use it to for more than your JavaScript needs, like minifying your
css
, or running a proxy server around your Django dev server that auto-reloads your browser when files change or the Django server restarts. With this in mind, it might make more sense to think of Node.js as a tool in your build process that could touch any part of your project, the bundling/transpiling of JavaScript being only one part of that.