Django MEDIA_URL again ... Unhandle - django

Question

my settings.py file
MEDIA_ROOT = '/home/path/to/htdocs/mysite/public/media/'
MEDIA_URL = '/site_media/'
ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX = '/media/'
in site_media i have my images and CSS
...href="{{ MEDIA_URL }}/style.css" ... (with {{ MEDIA_URL }}style.css is this same)
after render it look like this
href="/site_media/style.css"
but at http://example.com/site_media/style.css there is Unhandled Exception (i thing no url mapped in urls.py)
everything is work fine in DEBUG mode because i have this in urls.py
if settings.DEBUG:
urlpatterns += patterns('',
(r'^media/(.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve', {'document_root': os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'media')}),
(r'^site_media/(.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve', {'document_root': os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'site_media')}),
)
but what I need to do when DEBUG = False

Answer 1

what is happening is that in DEBUG mode django serves your style.css file. You tell it to do that with this line
(r'^site_media/(.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve', {'document_root': os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'site_media')}),
)
But this line does not go into the urlpatterns variable when debug is false. To test that try to access localhost:8000/site_media/style.css when debug is true (should work) and when it is false (will give a 404 error).
You could just leave out the
if settings.DEBUG:
part, but that means that django would still serve static files and that is not recommended in production for performance reasons.
In a production setup you should use a different webserver to serve your static files. I have had good experiences with nginx running in front of apache.
This is an excellent tutorial which shows you how to create such a setup:
http://www.ventanazul.com/webzine/tutorials/django-deployment-guide-ubuntu
Be prepared though that creating a production setup is not quite as painless as just typing python manage.py runserver. I have also heard good things about using nginx together with gunicorn and that that makes setting up a production server much simpler, but have no experience with it myself.

Answer 2

You need to serve them somehow yourself.
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/static-files/#serving-static-files-from-a-dedicated-server
In production, use something like Apache or Nginx to serve your static files.
Basically, you map a URL (in your case /site_media/) in the server to a folder on your server (like wherever your media directory is now) and you're done. All requests to /site_media/ now don't go to your app but go searching the directory for static files to serve.
Implementation depends on which server setup you go for.