Making static file serve location configurable in Django?

Question

I'm developing with Django on my computer, and the location of all my static files are different than on my host. Is there a way to make this a configurable parameter?

For example, on my computer, I have to include jquery.js in my templates, which is located in /includes/jquery.js, but on my host, it's located at ../static/jquery.js, but I don't want to make all of these changes for every template page.

Answer 1

Well, Django config files are python scripts, so you have a great fidelity in them. For example, you may want to create list of locations for every host, and read them in your configuration files.

Answer 2

There are two questions here. The first is how to configure where Django finds static files, and the URL prefixes used when linking to/including static resources. The answer to that question is to use the MEDIA_URL and MEDIA_ROOT settings to control the URL mapping and on-disk path info for static media. See the Django setting reference docs for more info on that task.

Then, your second implicit question is how to maintain different settings for your local development environment and the production deployment. There are many different "recipes" for maintaining multiple parallel configuration environments for Django projects, but I find the simplest method to simply be adding something like this to the bottom of my settings.py:

try:
  from settings_local.py import *
except ImportError:
  pass

Then, if either system (dev or production) has a file called settings_local.py in the root project directory, configuration options set there will override those made in the main settings.py. I then usually add the local file to the ignore list for my version control, and put machine-dependent or security-sensitive data (like database passwords) into it, while the bulk of the configuration can live in the main version-controlled settings.py.

Answer 3

See the djangodose article on configuring development and production environments and specifically the fourth comment. The instructions given specifically address your question of keeping all settings in the VCS - But what if I'm changing the file that has this configurable location? I don't want to put it on my ignore list.