ansaurus

Question

Django: how do you serve media / stylesheets and link to them within templates

Answer 1

+1 A:

I've got a couple of ideas, I don't know which one of them is working for me :)

Make sure to use a trailing slash, and to have this be different from the MEDIA_URL setting (since the same URL cannot be mapped onto two different sets of files).

That's from http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/settings/#admin-media-prefix

Secondly, it may be that you're confusing directories on your filesystem with url paths. Try using absolute urls, and then refine them down.

sykora 2009-01-15 09:15:37

Answer 2

+1 A:

I just use absolute naming. Unless you're running the site in a deep path (or even if you are), I'd drop the .. and go for something like:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/media/styles.css">

Oli 2009-01-15 09:27:23

Answer 3

+2 A:

I usually make my own Template simple tag because Django isn't giving CSS/JavaScript files. Apache does it so my media url is usually http://static.mysite.com.

yourApp/templatetags/media_url.py:

from django.template import Library
from yourapp.settings import MEDIA_URL
register = Library()

@register.simple_tag
def media_url():
    return MEDIA_URL

And in my template file:

{% load media_url %}
<link href="{{ media_url }}css/main.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">

You could also make your own context preprocessor to add the media_url variable in every template.

bchhun 2009-01-15 18:40:22

Or you could just use django.core.context_processors.media, which is built in and does the same thing.

Carl Meyer 2009-01-15 19:37:42

ahh I should have known! I was so eager to make my own template tags that I missed that one!!

bchhun 2009-01-15 20:10:12

@Carl Meyer: Best answer so far. Thanks.

Liam 2010-03-10 18:08:44

Answer 4

+18 A:

I just had to figure this out myself.

settings.py:

MEDIA_ROOT = 'C:/Server/Projects/project_name/static/'
MEDIA_URL = '/static/'
ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX = '/media/'

urls.py:

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

template file:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/static/css/style.css" />

With the file located here:

"C:/Server/Projects/project_name/static/css/style.css"

Note how the MEDIA_URL and the ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX are different? This is on purpose, they can't be the same!

Ty 2009-01-15 18:56:51

MEDIA_URL and the ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX; they can be same. It is just not a good idea.

muhuk 2009-01-17 13:45:26

True, because one will always override the other and you'll end up serving your app's media files from the same folder as you're admin's media files. That's just usually not the desired result.

Ty 2009-01-19 18:55:18

Answer 5

+1 A:

Just thought I'd chime in quickly. While all the propositions here work just fine, and I do use Ty's example while developing, once you hit production you might want to opt to serve files via a straight Apache, or whichever else server you're using.

What I do is I setup a subdomain once I'm done developing, and replace all links to static media. For instance:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://static.mydomain.com/css/style.css" />

The reasons for doing this are two-fold. First, it just seems like it would be slower to have Django handle these requests when it's not needed. Second, since most browsers can actually download files simultaneously from 3 different domains, using a second sub-domain for your static files will actually speed up the download speed of your users.

Dave 2009-01-20 15:04:57

Answer 6

+4 A:

Django already has a context process for MEDIA_URL, see Django's documentation.

It should be availbale by default (unless you've customized CONTEXT_PROCESSORS and forgot to add it) in a RequestContext.

2009-01-26 10:49:00

For Example: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="{{ MEDIA_URL }}styles.css" />You can also follow this bit to ease your development locally:http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.0/howto/static-files/

Edmundito 2009-06-04 21:52:42

Answer 7

A:

Another thing to add is that if you have a separate media server on a subdomain/different domain, you can disable cookies for your static media. Saves a little processing and bandwidth.

Marlin Forbes 2010-08-10 16:51:58

ansaurus

tags:

views:

answers:

Django: how do you serve media / stylesheets and link to them within templates

related questions