static files on nginx wont work

Using Django Deployment
1

Hey,

I’m trying to deploy my website and I used an nginx server with gunicorn. The server works as expected but the static files wont work, I guess I messed something up in my settings.py

STATIC_URL = '/static/'

STATIC_ROOT = "/root/static"

I already moved my static files with collectstatic to my new directory on my server and they are in there but it doesnt work on the website.

2

this is in my sites-available from NGINX

location /static/ {
	root /root/static;
}

I set something up wrong but I dont know where the error is.

3

Check first to ensure that nginx has permissions to those files. (Likely not. Note that while you might start nginx as root, the nginx process will downgrade itself to a non-root account by default. You definitely don’t want nginx itself running as root.)

In the common case, you want to deploy your static files to a directory already owned / accessible to nginx, which usually means something under /var/www. You almost certainly don’t want to expose /root to the outside world under any circumstances.

See: Pitfalls and Common Mistakes | NGINX

Also see:
https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/start/topics/tutorials/config_pitfalls/#root-inside-location-block

and note the distinction between what’s served with root vs alias.

2 Likes
4

so this is my settings.py now:

STATIC_URL = '/static/'
STATIC_ROOT = "/var/www/divusx.com/static/"

and this is my sites-avalable:

location /static/ {
	root /var/www/divusx.com/static/;
}

and after collectstatic command the files were moved to the var directory but on my site there still isnt any static content.

How can I check that nginx has the permission that it needs? What should I do that it runs correctly?

1 Like
5

I’m thinking in this case it’s the “root” vs “alias” situation. Change the directive from root to alias.