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# Optimizing Toscawidgets Resources

Toscawidgets uses a lot of static files for its widgets. Having those files served by the middleware is quite inefficient and doesn’t usually provide any extra feature, so it is usually a good idea to let a web server directly serve them.

## Extracting static files

People at Toscawidgets know this and have been so kind to provide a way to extract all the static files needed by the widgets that your application is currently using and since Turbogears 2.1.1 this command is directly exposed when you `quickstart` a new application.

Static resources can be extracted by using:

    python setup.py archive_tw_resources

By default the static files will be extracted to your project `public` directory, and if you had properly configured your web server or are using a proxy server you should end up having your public directory directly served by you webserver instead of passing through toscawidgets middleware.

## Compressing static files

By default turbogears won’t compress your static files, it will just extract them. This is because static files compression requires a working java environment and the YUICompressor tool.

If you want to enable extracted files compression you just have to modify your `setup.cfg` by uncommenting those two lines:

    #yuicompressor = /home/someuser/bin/yuicompressor.jar
    #compresslevel = 2

The first one must point to your YUICompressor executable and the second one can be used to specify the compression level.