Re: Confusion about Static Files

David,

This took me a while to figure out also when I first started.  Running with debug on and runserver works great, then you try to use it in production and things break.  The big picture idea is that static files are intended to be hosted by something in front of Django, be that Apache or Ngnix or whatever.  All of the django.contrib.static module does is define a) how/where the manage.py collectstatic command finds static files, STATICFILES_FINDERS, STATICFILES_DIRS, b) where it will save them on the local filesystem STATIC_ROOT, and c) what URL prefix will get used in templates STATIC_URL.

With settings.DEBUG  = True, you can add static files to your url pattern with the code below so that your server will work with manage.py runserver, but as soon as you go production and turn off DEBUG, this will stop working by design.

---

from django.contrib.staticfiles.urls import staticfiles_urlpatterns

# ... the rest of your URLconf goes here ...

urlpatterns += staticfiles_urlpatterns()

---

You really want not to serve files through Django.  Just do a collectstatic before runserver, and point your web server /static/ location at that directory. Here is a link to the nginx.conf file used by Mezzanine (a Django CMS app).

https://github.com/nimbis/mezzanine-project/blob/master/deploy/

Notice that location /static/ is served directly and everything else for the most part is a redirect to the Django server running on another port.  You can find Apache examples all over the place.  

Brian Schott

bfschott@gmail.com

On Mar 29, 2013, at 3:36 PM, David Pitchford <david.t.pitchford@seagate.com> wrote:

I am experienced with Python but new to Django and web development in general. I am struggling to understand its static files system from the documentation. It seems like I have to set multiple settings variables and create multiple folders in order to get the server to accomplish the simple task of "finding" these files. After toying with it for a few hours I haven't been able to get the static files system to work and and have resorted to the following system which is probably a very bad idea:

In views.py:

from django.http import HttpResponse

from django.shortcuts import render_to_response

from django.template import RequestContext

import datetime

import os.path

import settings

statictypes = {".css": "text/css",

               ".js": "text/javascript"}

def servestatic(request, filename):

    fullfilename = os.path.join(settings.STATIC_ROOT, filename)

    ext = os.path.splitext(filename)[1]

    return HttpResponse(open(fullfilename).read(), content_type=statictypes[ext])

And in urls.py:

from django.conf.urls import patterns, include, url

import mysite.views as views

staticextensions = [ext[1:] for ext in views.statictypes.keys()]

staticextstring = '|'.join(staticextensions)

urlpatterns = patterns('',

...

    (r"([^/]+\.(?:%s))$" % staticextstring, views.servestatic)

)

This actually works (and I could optimize it by caching the static file contents in memory rather than continually rereading them), but of course it's circumventing Django's built-in system for managing static files. My project architecture looks like this:

mysite

|

|--manage.py

|--mysite

   |

   |__init__.py

   |settings.py

   |urls.py

   |views.py

   |wgsi.py

   |--static

   |  |

   |  |--jquery.js

   |  |--TestFormat.css

   |

   |--templates

      |

      |--TestTemplate.html

At the beginning, the documentation page mentions, "For small projects, this isn't a big deal, because you can just keep the static files somewhere your web server can find it." This sounds like the simple solution I'm looking for; what does it mean and how do I do it? I'm also frequently confused by how when I created the project it created two nested folders with the same name. Which is considered to be the "project root"?

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