Deploy Static files

Using Django Deployment
3

Briefly reviewing the two key settings:

STATIC_ROOT = The location where static files are going to be copied using the collectstatic command.

The user running collectstatic must have “write” permissions to that directory, including the ability to create subdirectories.

The web server must have “read” permissions to this entire directory tree.

In the common case, this directory should be outside your project directory. It’s actually quite common to define this within /var/www/ or even /var/www/html/ on Unix-style systems.

STATIC_URL = The base URL for creating references to static files. This setting has no meaning with Django, other than for creating URLs being referenced within the static tag used in templates.

This is the URL path that you will associate with STATIC_ROOT in your web server configuration.

For example, if you have:
STATIC_ROOT = '/var/www/html/project1'
and
STATIC_URL='/static/'

Then your web server needs to be configured such that the location /static causes the web server to retrieve files from /var/www/html/project1

The most common issues I see with handling static files include:

  • Using a STATIC_ROOT inside the project directory
  • Not assigning proper permissions to the STATIC_ROOT directory.
  • Not having the web server configured to map STATIC_URL to STATIC_ROOT
  • Not running collectstatic
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