What are MEDIA_URL and MEDIA_ROOT in django and why do we need to use them?
Can't we directly add images directly into the database by logging in to admin account.
I guess your main confusion might be MEDIA vs STATIC. It's pretty clear in the docs, still:
STATIC is basically where you keep your files that are required to run your website properly, say css, js, some jpg/png/img files (say site logo, background, favicon etc).
MEDIA is for user uploaded files. Say, a user uploads his/her resume, profile photo etc.
MEDIA_ROOT: is the absolute filesystem path to the directory that will hold user-uploaded files.
MEDIA_URL: is the URL that handles the media served from MEDIA_ROOT. E.g. the /media/ in www.example.com/media/somefile.mp4
STATIC_ROOT: is the absolute path to the directory where your static files are placed for deployment.
STATIC_URL: URL to use when referring to static files located in STATIC_ROOT. E.g. the /static/ in www.example.com/static/mysite.css
Ref: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.0/ref/settings/#std:setting-MEDIA_ROOT
Related
I’m migrating a website from WordPress to Django/Wagtail. I have all the old WP content in my media directory & it’s all being served appropriately.
It would be convenient to map other URLs (specifically /wp-content/) to MEDIA_ROOT, for the sake of old media URLs that were hardcoded in the content.
So for example a migrated asset now available at //example.com/media/uploads/2017/12/IMG_2120.jpg can also be served from //example.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/IMG_2120.jpg
I’m sure there’s some obvious way to do this (in urls.py?) but totally drawing a blank.
I'm sure you already know that static/media files should be served using a frontend server (like Nginx), because it's been mentioned at so many places in the docs.
So, if Django doesn't serve the files, why does it need the MEDIA_ROOT and MEDIA_URL settings?
MEDIA_ROOT is the place where Django stores the images/files you upload.
MEDIA_URL is used by Django to generate file urls. For example, if MEDIA_URL = '/media/', then if you do {{ image.url }}, Django will generate a url like this - /media/image.jpg.
But Django doesn't serve the files. Your frontend server does. So, what you do is, you configure your frontend server like this:
if request path starts with /media/:
map it to <media directory>
Basically, you're telling your frontend server to serve content from the <media directory> for every request that starts with /media/. This way, a request starting with /media/ never actually reaches your Django app, because your server is taking care of them.
What I mean by all this is that you can configure your frontend server to map /wp-content/uploads/ to your <media directory> and it will serve the files.
I've found plenty of advice for how to tackle static files in Django 1.x. Is there a best practices way to go about doing so?
There are may approaches to serving static files in Django, but Django 1.3 introduced a new option to handle them. Basically, you can define specific directories at a project level or at an app level that contain static media. Then via a management command, 'collectstatic', you can copy all of the static files in your project directory to a separate directory (likely external to your project) that is served by your webserver. This solves a lot of complications of the previous approaches.
1) It allows 3rd party apps to easily include static files in a standard way. No more creating symlinks from your webserver directory to locations inside of individual python/django modules.
2) It gives you more control over where your webserver can host its static files. For example, you can define all of your static media inside of you project under version control, but then copy it all to an external location anywhere on the filesystem. This prevents having to point your webserver to a location inside of your project.
3) Is splits out static media that that will never change from static media that is uploaded by a user using something like a FileField. This is good because you likely want to keep site-level static media in version control (to be installed on your dev servers), but user-submitted content will upload to a different directory (unlike versions of django prior to 1.3).
I think this functionality used to be a 3rd party module that was merged into core.
Here are the docs:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/static-files/
Basically there are a few new settings.py variables:
STATIC_ROOT - This is a directory on your filesystem that will be served by your webserver. When you run ./manage.py collectstatic, all of the static files from your project and it's apps will be copied into the directory that you specify here.
STATIC_URL - This is the url that you will set to represent what url base your content will be based from. If you set this value to "/static/", then "/static/" will prefix all urls of static media that included. You will also use this variable in your templates. For example, in your template, you could specify something like:
<img src="{{ STATIC_URL }}logo.png">
The STATIC_ROOT settings variable specifies where static files are copied to, but you also need to provide a location of where static files are copied from. This can be done by creating a directory in your individual Django apps called "static//", similar to what you would do for templates within an app. Upon running the collectstatic command, Django will copy all of the static files from all of the "static/" directories in all of your apps to the STATIC_ROOT directory. You can also use the STATICFILES_DIRS settings variable to define project-level directories to copy static media from.
Though there are many ways to serve static media, I think this is a nice api set in place by Django that will help with better integrating 3rd party modules. The fact that this feature is now included in core could give some indication that this approach may have gained some momentum.
Hope this helps,
Joe
I'm confused about static files and media files in django. I've seen elsewhere that people use it interchangeably.
When should I use media_root and when should I use static_root?
If I have site images should I put it in static? And if I have product images do I put it in media?
MEDIA_ROOT is the directory where file uploads are placed, as well as where generated files are usually stored. For example, one of my Django apps allows users to upload images. In one of the model classes, I use the ImageField type from sorl-thumbnail with upload_to='%Y-%m'. Whenever a user uploads an image, the file is stored in MEDIA_ROOT/%Y-%m/ (with %Y replaced with the current year and %m replaced with the current month number). Also, when sorl-thumbnail generates a thumbnail for an uploaded image, it places the thumbnail by default somewhere in MEDIA_ROOT/cache/.
STATIC_ROOT is used to configure the directory where static assets are placed. For example, site stylesheets, JavaScript files, and images used in the design of web pages are the types of files that go into STATIC_ROOT. If you have multiple installed apps, each app that uses static files can have its own static files directory. You use the collectstatic management function (invoked via python manage.py collectstatic) to copy all of the apps' static files into STATIC_ROOT.
My Django site lets users upload images. It's running on Apache.
Files are uploaded via a FileUpload form. The folder to which files are uploaded is outside the Django project, and protected as described here, i.e. the folder has 755 permissions and files have 644 permissions.
I now want to serve the images up to users - but I need to do it securely, so that executable scripts don't run, and so that users can't e.g. delete all the images in the directory.
My question is, how do I serve the uploaded images to users in a secure way? Can I serve them safely as static media directly from that folder, with those permissions? Or should I copy them into another directory with different permissions, and serve them from there?
I'm serving the other static media (/media/css) on the site as a separate, static application.
Thanks!
The way to do this is to configure your web server to serve files with the names it expects, and with a correct image content-type. Use Django's ImageField for some level of validation by PIL/Pillow that uploaded files are images. For this directory, disable webserver features like autogenerating directory indexes, autoserving everything from the filesystem, guessing at mime types, and running cgi scripts.
I'm hosting a site on WebFaction using Django/mod_python/Python2.5. I've recently run into the concept of static files (when setting up my Django admin).
From what I understand, serving static files is simply the idea of telling the server to serve files directly from a specific directory, rather than first routing the request through apache, then mod_python, then django, and finally back to the user. In the case of WebFaction this helps especially since there are two Apache servers that your request must go through (your app's server and the main public server).
Why is it that when I setup Django's static files, it only needs the /media folder in /contrib/admin? Is it just that all of Django's static content is related to the admin panel?
When I want to serve my own static content (images, css, etc.) should I include it in the same /media folder or set up another alias for my own content (/my_media)?
Yes, the static files used by Django are pretty much related to images, javascript and css for the admin. All other static content comes from your application. You can keep both sets (yours and the admin) under the same server. Just set the appropriate folders in the settings file.
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/settings/#admin-media-prefix
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/settings/#media-root
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/settings/#media-url
See this post for a little more information:
Django and Static Files
Django's static files (e.g. js, css, images, etc.) are all in the media folder, and are related to the admin panel.
On WebFaction to save processing power, and more importantly memory, it is better to serve these from your secondary apache server (or even better from nginx or lighttpd) without having to go through mod_python and Django.
I use the following folder setup for my files:
media
css
js
img
etc
admin
css
js
img
See http://forum.webfaction.com/viewtopic.php?id=1981 for how to setup nginx as your secondary server on WebFaction if you are interested.