Django staticfiles app help

I implore you to read the howto docs here: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/static-files/

In short: STATIC_ROOT is only used if you call the collectstatic manangement command. It's not needed to add the directory to the STATICFILES_DIRS setting to serve your static files!

During development (when the automatic serving view is used) staticfiles will automatically look for static files in various locations (because you call its "serve" view with a path to a static file). For this search it'll use the so called "finders" (as defined in the STATICFILES_FINDERS setting).

1. One of the default finders is the AppDirectoriesFinder, which will look in the "/static/" directory of each of the apps of yours INSTALLED_APPS setting.

2. Another default finder is the FileSystemFinder, which will look in directories you specify in the STATICFILES_DIRS setting.

BTW, both these search patterns are similar to how template loading works.

The same technique will be used when running the collectstatic command, except that it now will collect the files from the various locations (using the same finders as above), putting the found files into STATIC_ROOT, ready for deployment.

If you want just a solution - scroll down to the "Solution".

Overview

I was discovering the same problem yesterday. Here is what I found:

All you need is appropriate static finder, that will find your STATIC_ROOT and all its contents, but there is no such finder. Here are default finders:

• django.contrib.staticfiles.finders.AppDirectoriesFinder - search installed django applications dirs for 'static' folder, but most of them use obsolete 'media' folders for now.

• django.contrib.staticfiles.finders.FileSystemFinder - use all dirs mentioned in the STATICFILES_DIRS, but you can't add STATIC_ROOT into it.

• django.contrib.staticfiles.finders.DefaultStorageFinder - search static in your DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE which is django.core.files.storage.FileSystemStorage by default and it points to your MEDIA_ROOT

Solution

That's all, no additional choices. There are no choices to use STATIC_ROOT for now (in Django 1.3).
So I've just wrote my own custom finder for these needs:

• My custom static finder file: finders.py:

  from django.core.files.storage import FileSystemStoragefrom django.contrib.staticfiles.finders import BaseStorageFinderfrom django.conf import settingsclass StaticFinder(BaseStorageFinder):    storage = FileSystemStorage(settings.STATIC_ROOT, settings.STATIC_URL)

• settings.py:

  STATICFILES_FINDERS = (    'finders.StaticFinder',)

• If you want to use it with another finders - I suggest to put them after it inside STATICFILES_FINDERS

And remember: this solution should be used only in development needs and never on production!

I found a quick and easy workaround to serve project global static files during development:

• Start a new app that contains your projects static files (e.g. "manage.py startapp static_content")
• Create a folder named 'static' in that app and put your static files there.
• Add your new app to the list of installed apps