This is probably a stupid question, but it's just not clicking in my head.
In Django, the convention is to put all of your static files (i.e css, js) specific to your app into a folder called static. So the structure would look like this:
mysite/
manage.py
mysite/ --> (settings.py, etc)
myapp/ --> (models.py, views.py, etc)
static/
In mysite/settings.py I have:
STATIC_ROOT = 'staticfiles'
So when I run the command:
python manage.py collectstatic
It creates a folder called staticfiles at the root level (so same directory as myapp/)
What's the point of this? Isn't it just creating a copy of all my static files?
Collect static files from multiple apps into a single path
Well, a single Django project may use several apps, so while there you only have one
myapp
, it may actually bemyapp1
,myapp2
, etcBy copying them from inside the individual apps into a single folder, you can point your frontend web server (e.g. nginx) to that single folder
STATIC_ROOT
and serve static files from a single location, rather than configure your web server to serve static files from multiple paths.Persistent URLs with ManifestStaticFilesStorage
A note about the MD5 hash being appended to the filename for versioning: It's not part of the default behavior of
collectstatic
, assettings.STATICFILES_STORAGE
defaults toStaticFilesStorage
(which doesn't do that)The MD5 hash will kick in e.g. if you set it to use
ManifestStaticFilesStorage
, which ads that behavior.Django static files can be in many places. A file that is served as
/static/img/icon.png
could come from many places. By default:FileSystemFinder
will look forimg/icon.png
in each ofSTATICFILES_DIRS
,AppDirectoriesFinder
will look forimg/icon.png
in thestatic
subfolder in each of yourINSTALLED_APPS
. This allows libraries like Django Admin to add their own static files to your app.Now: this only works if you run
manage.py runserver
with DEBUG=1. When you go live, the Django process will no longer serve the static assets. It would be inefficient to use Django for serving these, there are more specialised tools specifically for that.Instead, you should do something like this:
static
directory somewhere on your webserver or a third-party file storage)/static/*
directly from that directory and redirect any other requests to Django.collectstatic
is a ready-made script that prepares this directory for you, so that you can connect it directly to your deployment script.It's useful when there are multiple django apps within the site.
collectstatic
will then collect static files from all the apps in one place - so that it could be served up in a production environment.In the production installation, you want to have persistent URLs. The URL doesn't change unless the file content changes.
This is to prevent having clients to have wrong version of CSS or JS file on their computer when opening a web page from Django. Django staticfiles detects file changes and updates URLs accordingly, so that if CSS or JS file changes the web browser downloads the new version.
This is usually achieved by adding MD5 hash to the filename during
collectstatic
run.Edit: Also see related answer to multiple apps.