Django built-in server cannot decode URL parameters - django

Question

I'm not sure if this is a Django-specific issue but right now I see it in my project.
Because browsers tend to cache favicon and I have changed them for my website, I came up with a trick to force anyone who have visited my site before to receive the new icons, adding "?" followed by some random characters to the image file name, so currently it is like this:
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" sizes="32x32" href="{% static 'images/favicons/favicon-32x32.png?v=Gv6qnaoWO5' %}">
Now the issue is, the favicon is not loading and when I check the source I see this:
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" sizes="32x32" href="/static/images/favicons/favicon-32x32.png%3Fv%3DGv6qnaoWO5">
and when I click on the above link, I get 404 error from django.views.static.serve. If I remove the "?" and rest of characters, everything works fine.
If memory serves, this is normal encoding of special characters and the web server should decode it, but this is not happening on Django's built-in server.
So, is there a fix for this, or I should wait until moving the site to production?

Answer 1

static takes a filename, and builds the URL. A filename doesn't have query parameters. Add the query parameters to it after the fact:
href="{% static 'images/favicons/favicon-32x32.png' %}?v=Gv6qnaoWO5">