Django static files not loading (production) - django

Question

I can not see my static files when running the project on the server (at my desktop it was ok).
When I look for the picture path on my browser I have
/static/app_name/images/image_name
My images are stored at
www.mydomain.com/xxx/xxx/static/app_name/images/image_name
I tried to adjust the settings.py from
'/static/'
to
'/xxx/xxx/static/'
But it seems to have no effect as the images path on my browser are still
/static/app_name/images/image_name and not /xxx/xxx/static/app_name/images/image_name
Am I missing something here?
Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

Changing STATIC_URL = '/static/' is only going to change the URL, not where the images are actually served.
Make sure that STATIC_ROOT is pointing to /path/to/www.mydomain.com/xxx/xxx/static/ and make sure you are using hard-coded paths in your settings.py, not something like
os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__, 'static'))
Then in your templates
<!-- either -->
<img src="{{ STATIC_URL }}img/my_image.png" />
<!-- or -->
{% load static %}
<img src="{% static 'img/my_image.png' %}" />
Also, be sure you're running python manage.py collectstatic to collect all of the static files from all of your apps to place them in the STATIC_ROOT directory.
Also
Depending on which server you're using, make sure you have a path alias that points to your static directory. For example, in Apache in your /sites-available/www.mydomain.com conf make sure that this Alias directive exists
<VirtualHost *:80>
...
Alias /static /path/to/www.mydomain.com/xxx/xxx/static/
...
</VirtualHost>