Django: Problem with template paths? - django

Question

So after a few hours of irritation i finally got my django site up and running! The only problem i have now is that all the stylesheets/images are linked incorrectly. Or, well, they are linked correctly but django wont give me the files, kind of.
This is how it's set up:
views.py:
from django.shortcuts import render_to_response
def home(request):
return render_to_response('index.html')
urls.py:
from django.conf.urls.defaults import patterns, include, url
urlpatterns = patterns('',
# Examples:
url(r'^$', 'mysite.views.home', name='home'),
)
and that brings up index.html, but none of the other files are shown, like images, stylesheets etc. How do I solve this? I have a feeling it's really easy!? I tried googling, but couldn't find anything.
Thanks in advance,
qwerty

Answer 1

It sounds like what you're looking for is the ability to serve static files.
Basically, you'll need to add a folder somewhere in your project to save the media to. Then, you'll need to edit your urls.py and settings.py files to accommodate access to your new static media directory.
urls.py
urlpatterns = patterns('',
# Examples:
url(r'^$', 'mysite.views.home', name='home'),
(r'^static/(?P<path>.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve', {'document_root':
settings.STATIC_ROOT}),
)
settings.py
PROJECT_ROOT = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__))
# Should be the location where you put your static folder.
# Should be different for testing and production environments.
STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(PROJECT_ROOT, 'media')
# This is assuming that your settings.py file is in path/to/project/ and your
# static files are in path/to/project/media/
Then in your template you can do this:
< img src="/static/my_image.jpg" / >
Or whatever you want. This will work for javascript, css and image files.

Answer 2

Expanding on Shamanu4's comment: what you're asking for is how static files are served. For development purposes, you can use the static file server.
Long term, though, this is not an optimal solution. The easy way is to segregate all your static files and serve them directly through your web browser via a different path. In Apache, this static file path can be inside your Django path if you configure the static path first.
If you need high performance, though, the Django team recommends that you use a lightweight, speed-optimized server (such as lighttpd) to serve static files and another server with WSGI support (such as Apache) to serve Django.
In the Django project I have at work, I have Django served from /djangoprojname/ and static files served from /djangoprojname/static/. On disk, the static directory is at the same level as my Django project's directory. both of which are in a Mercurial repository. Within static/, I have css/, js/, and img/, and within those directories, I have one directory per app, named the same as the app. This keeps things from getting messy.
My django.conf (in /etc/httpd/conf.d on Fedora or RHEL) looks something like:
WSGIDaemonProcess djangoprojname threads=15
WSGISocketPrefix /var/run/wsgi/wsgi
Alias /djangoprojname/static/ /var/www/djangoprojname/static/
Alias /djangoprojname/admin/media/ /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/django/contrib/admin/media/
WSGIScriptAlias /djangoprojname /var/www/djangoprojname/django.wsgi
WSGIProcessGroup djangoprojname
<Directory /var/www/djangoprojname>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Directory>
<Directory /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/django/contrib/admin/media>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Directory>
For development, I added this to the end of my project's urls.py:
# Only serve static media if in development (runserver) mode.
if settings.IS_DEV:
urlpatterns += patterns('',
url(r'^static/(?P<path>.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve',
{'document_root': settings.MEDIA_ROOT,
'show_indexes': True}),
)
settings.IS_DEV is set in my settings.py to True if this is running on a development server. manage.py is modified to set an environment variable if runserver is used, and settings.py checks for this variable. MEDIA_ROOT is set to the path to the static directory.

Answer 3

You are probably having problem with MEDIA_ROOT and MEDIA_URL in your settings.py. Please refer to http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/ref/settings/#media-root