moocedx / django-staticfiles

A Django app that provides helpers for serving static files, used in Django and Pinax.

django-staticfiles

This is a Django app that provides helpers for serving static files.

Django developers mostly concern themselves with the dynamic parts of web applications -- the views and templates that render new for each request. But web applications have other parts: the static media files (images, CSS, Javascript, etc.) that are needed to render a complete web page.

For small projects, this isn't a big deal, because you can just keep the media somewhere your web server can find it. However, in bigger projects -- especially those comprised of multiple apps -- dealing with the multiple sets of static files provided by each application starts to get tricky.

That's what staticfiles is for:

Collecting static files from each of your Django apps (and any other place you specify) into a single location that can easily be served in production.

The main website for django-staticfiles is github.com/jezdez/django-staticfiles where you can also file tickets.

Note

django-staticfiles is now part of Django (since 1.3) as django.contrib.staticfiles.

The django-staticfiles 0.3.X series will only receive security and data loss bug fixes after the release of django-staticfiles 1.0. Any Django 1.2.X project using django-staticfiles 0.3.X and lower should be upgraded to use either Django >= 1.3's staticfiles app or django-staticfiles >= 1.0 to profit from the new features and stability.

You may want to chose to use django-staticfiles instead of Django's own staticfiles app since any new feature (additionally to those backported from Django) will be released first in django-staticfiles.

Installation

• Use your favorite Python packaging tool to install staticfiles from PyPI, e.g.:

  pip install django-staticfiles
  

  You can also install the in-development version of django-staticfiles with pip install django-staticfiles==dev.

• Added "staticfiles" to your INSTALLED_APPS setting:

  INSTALLED_APPS = [
      # ...
      "staticfiles",
  ]
  

• Set your STATIC_URL setting to the URL that handles serving static files:

  STATIC_URL = "/static/"
  

• In development mode (when DEBUG = True) the runserver command will automatically serve static files:

  python manage.py runserver
  

• Once you are ready to deploy all static files of your site in a central directory (STATIC_ROOT) to be served by a real webserver (e.g. Apache, Cherokee, Lighttpd, Nginx etc.), use the collectstatic management command:

  python manage.py collectstatic
  

  See the webserver's documentation for descriptions how to setup serving the deployment directory (STATIC_ROOT).

• (optional) In case you use Django's admin app, make sure the ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX setting is set correctly to a subpath of STATIC_URL:

  ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX = STATIC_URL + "admin/"