django-staticfiles

This is a Django app that provides helpers for serving static files.

Django developers mostly concern themselves with the dynamic parts of web applications – the views and templates that render new for each request. But web applications have other parts: the static media files (images, CSS, Javascript, etc.) that are needed to render a complete web page.

For small projects, this isn’t a big deal, because you can just keep the media somewhere your web server can find it. However, in bigger projects – especially those comprised of multiple apps – dealing with the multiple sets of static files provided by each application starts to get tricky.

That’s what staticfiles is for:

Collecting static files from each of your Django apps (and any other place you specify) into a single location that can easily be served in production.

The main website for django-staticfiles is github.com/jezdez/django-staticfiles where you can also file tickets.

Note

django-staticfiles is now part of Django (since 1.3) as django.contrib.staticfiles.

The django-staticfiles 0.3.X series will only receive security and data los bug fixes after the release of django-staticfiles 1.0. Any Django 1.2.X project using django-staticfiles 0.3.X and lower should be upgraded to use either Django >= 1.3’s staticfiles app or django-staticfiles >= 1.0 to profit from the new features and stability.

You may want to chose to use django-staticfiles instead of Django’s own staticfiles app since any new feature (additionally to those backported from Django) will be released first in django-staticfiles.

Installation

  • Use your favorite Python packaging tool to install staticfiles from PyPI, e.g.:

    pip install django-staticfiles
    

    You can also install the in-development version of django-staticfiles with pip install django-staticfiles==dev.

  • Added "staticfiles" to your INSTALLED_APPS setting:

    INSTALLED_APPS = [
        # ...
        "staticfiles",
    ]
    
  • Set your STATIC_URL setting to the URL that handles serving static files:

    STATIC_URL = "/static/"
    
  • In development mode (when DEBUG = True) the runserver command will automatically serve static files:

    python manage.py runserver
    
  • Once you are ready to deploy all static files of your site in a central directory (STATIC_ROOT) to be served by a real webserver (e.g. Apache, Cherokee, Lighttpd, Nginx etc.), use the collectstatic management command:

    python manage.py collectstatic
    

    See the webserver’s documentation for descriptions how to setup serving the deployment directory (STATIC_ROOT).

  • (optional) In case you use Django’s admin app, make sure the ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX setting is set correctly to a subpath of STATIC_URL:

    ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX = STATIC_URL + "admin/"
    

Differences to django.contrib.staticfiles

Features of django-staticfiles which Django’s staticfiles doesn’t support:

  • Runs on Django 1.2.X.
  • STATICFILES_EXCLUDED_APPS settings – A sequence of dotted app paths that should be ignored when searching for static files.
  • STATICFILES_IGNORE_PATTERNS settings – A sequence of glob patterns of files and directories to ignore when running collectstatic.
  • Legacy ‘media’ dir file finder – a staticfiles finder that supports the location for static files that a lot of 3rd party apps support (staticfiles.finders.LegacyAppDirectoriesFinder).

See the Settings docs for more information.