Re: Why can't Nginx find Django's static files?

Django only serves up static files itself when run using runserver. This is meant for development and not production use. When you run it through gunicorn the Django framework won't serve up static files. That's why you connections to :8000 (gunicorn directly, bypassing nginx) don't work right.

For running in production/gunicorn you need to run "collectstatic" after changes, and connect to nginx (probably port 80/443) so that the "location/alias" block works as intended and you get your static files.

On Thu, Feb 20, 2020 at 10:36 AM Robert F. <robert.flaugher@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm trying to understand how static files are served up by Django using a project I've created on my Mac using Django 3, Gunicorn, and Nginx.  The website serves up templates correctly except that the templates can't see my CSS stylesheet.  When I go to a page, for example ```127.0.0.1:8000/app1/``` and view the source, I see this in my HTML template:

    <link rel="stylesheet" href="/static/css/main.css">

If I click on the href link, I get a page "Not Found" at the address ```http://127.0.0.1:8000/static/css/main.css```.  This seems like it should be the correct link but the template can't see the main.css stylesheet as I would expect.

Here are the relevant files in my 'mysite' project located in /Users/me/projects/django/django-staticfiles:

├── app1

│   ├── templates

│   │   └── app1

│   │       └── index.html

├── mysite

│   ├── settings.py

│   └── wsgi.py

├── static

│   └── css

│       └── main.css

├── static-final

│   ├── admin

│   │   ├── css

│   │   ├── fonts

│   │   ├── img

│   │   └── js

│   └── css

│       └── main.css

Here are the relevant settings:

# mysite/settings.py

...

DEBUG = False

ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['127.0.0.1', ]

...

INSTALLED_APPS = [

    'django.contrib.staticfiles',

    'app1',

]

...

STATIC_URL = '/static/'

STATICFILES_DIRS = (

        os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'static'),

)

STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'static-final/')

...

I installed Gunicorn into my virtual environment and run it with this command:

gunicorn --bind 0.0.0.0:8000 mysite.wsgi

I installed Nginx using Homebrew.  Here is the part of nginx.conf that includes my Nginx settings:

# /usr/local/etc/nginx.conf

...

http {

    ...

    server {

        listen      8080;

        server_name localhost;

    }

    ...

    include server/*;

}

Here is my Nginx configuration:

# /usr/local/etc/nginx/servers/django-staticfiles

server {

    listen 80;

    server_name 127.0.0.1;

    location / {

        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8000;

    }

    location /static/ {

        alias /Users/me/projects/django/django-staticfiles/static-final/;

    }

}

I should add that when I stop Gunicorn and start Django's development server with DEBUG = True, the app1 template accesses the main.css file correctly.  It just can't see it when I'm running Gunicorn and Nginx.  I realize that I don't have a real need to run Gunicorn/Nginx on my Mac, but I've just set it up so I can compare and contrast how Django manages static files in development versus production.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-users+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-users/75f129a6-2dbf-47cc-b4ea-08008b30b047%40googlegroups.com.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-users+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-users/CAD4ANxUeaiQEsgbk9KU93g0ONzJX1VLFWEbG5HK6kuO%2BUQd_pw%40mail.gmail.com.