Nginx doesn't serve static - django

Question

I'm running Django on Ubuntu Server 9.04.
Django works well, but nginx doesn't return static files - always 404.
Here's the config:
server {
listen 80;
server_name localhost;
#site_media - folder in uri for static files
location /static {
root /home/user/www/oil/oil_database/static_files;
autoindex on;
}
#location ~* ^.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|pdf|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|js|mov) {
# root /home/user/www/oil/oil_database/static_files;
# access_log off;
# expires 30d;
#}
location / {
root html;
index index.html index.htm;
# host and port to fastcgi server
#fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:8080;
fastcgi_pass unix:/home/user/www/oil/oil_database/oil.sock;
fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method;
fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length;
fastcgi_pass_header Authorization;
fastcgi_intercept_errors off;
}
access_log /var/log/nginx/localhost.access_log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/localhost.error_log;
}
Nginx version is 0.6.35.
All directories exist and made 777 (debugging paranoia). The commented-out block doesn't help when I uncomment it.

Answer 1

How is your directory setup? Do you have a folder static in /home/user/www/oil/oil_database/static_files? In that case, the directive should look like this (note the trailing slash in /static/):
location /static/ {
autoindex on;
root /home/user/www/oil/oil_database/static_files;
}
If you want to map the path /home/user/www/oil/oil_database/static_files to the URL /static/, you have to either
rename the folder static_files to static and use this directive:
location /static/ {
autoindex on;
root /home/user/www/oil/oil_database/;
}
use an alias:
location /static/ {
autoindex on;
alias /home/user/www/oil/oil_database/static_files/;
}
See the documentation on the root and alias directives.

Answer 2

I have a similar config for my Django sites, but I think you want to use alias instead of root for your media. For example:
location /static {
alias /home/user/www/oil/oil_database/static_files;
}