How does Django serve media files?

Question

I have set up a Django application that uses images. I think I have set up the media settings MEDIA_ROOT and MEDIA_URL correctly. However the images don't show up. Do you know what can be the problem?

Let consider this example:

The image files are under /home/www/media/app/photos and we are trying to request http://example.com/photos/123.jpg

Should I use these settings?

MEDIA\_ROOT = /home/www/media

MEDIA_URL = http://example.com/app

UPDATE: Forgot to mention that I'm using built-in development server.

Answer 1

Serving static content from Django is discouraged from the developer themselves (if I'm not wrong, it only works when in debug mode). You should use a dedicated web server, instead.

If you really need to do that, anyway, read the documentation on how to serve static files.

Answer 2

I suspect you are getting the Django 404 page. Try directly accessing one of your images and see if that's happening.

If so, your need to configure your web server to not send requests within your media hierarchy to Django but to instead serve them directly. Here is a snip from my Apache conf file. The first section tells Apache to send everything to Django. The second section has "SetHandler None" which says "handle stuff under /media in the normal way."

See http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/deployment/modpython/ for all the exciting details.

Partial httpd.conf file for PrinceOfPinot.com (AKA pop):

<Location "/">
    SetHandler python-program
    PythonAutoReload Off
    PythonDebug Off
    PythonPath "['/var/www/production/pop', '/usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages/django'] + sys.path"
    SetEnv DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE settings
    PythonHandler django.core.handlers.modpython
</Location>

<Location "/media">
    SetHandler None
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/css application/x-javascript
</Location>

Answer 3

FOR DEVELOPMENT ONLY

You can setup a static media server for use with their development server by doing this in your urls.py file. I have attached the code showing how I use it (along with the forced DEBUG conditionals.)

from django.conf import settings
from django.conf.urls.defaults import *      

# Uncomment the next two lines to enable the admin:
from django.contrib import admin
admin.autodiscover()

urlpatterns = patterns('', 
    (r'^$', 'views.index'),            

    # Accounts
    (r'^accounts/login/$', 'views.user_login'),
    (r'^accounts/logout/$', 'views.user_logout'),

    # Contrib Modules
    (r'^admin/(.*)', admin.site.root),
)

if settings.DEBUG :
    urlpatterns += patterns('',
        (r'^media/(?P<path>.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve', {'document_root': settings.MEDIA_ROOT, 'show_indexes': True}),
    )

I place my MEDIA_ROOT in a subdirectory of html/media and link to it as such in settings.py

MEDIA_ROOT = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'html/media/').replace('\\','/')

After development is finished, the project gets deployed to the web server where static media files are then served by Apache using directives.