Django Static Files

Static files like CSS, JavaScript, and fonts are a core piece of any modern web application. They are also typically confusing for Django newcomers since Django provides tremendous flexibility around how these files are used. This tutorial will demonstrate current best practices for configuring static files in both local development and production.

Local Development

For local development, the Django web server automatically serves static files, and minimal configuration is required. A single Django project often contains multiple apps, and by default, Django will look within each app for a static directory containing static files.

For example, if one of your apps was called blog and you wanted to add a CSS file to it called base.css, you would need first to create a new directory called blog/static and then add the file within it at the location blog/static/style.css.

However, since most Django projects involve multiple apps and shared static files, it is common on larger projects to create a base-level folder instead, typically named static. This can be added from the command line with the mkdir command:

(.venv) $ mkdir static

For demonstration purposes, let's also add a base.css file. Assuming you had only just started a new Django project with the startproject command, your directory structure would now look like this:

├── django_project
│   ├── __init__.py
|   ├── asgi.py
│   ├── settings.py
│   ├── urls.py
│   └── wsgi.py
├── manage.py
├── static
│   ├── base.css

Within the settings.py file, near the bottom, there is a single line of configuration for static files called STATIC_URL, which is the location of static files in our project. 

# django_project/settings.py
STATIC_URL = "static/"

All static files will be stored in the location http://127.0.0.1:8000/static/ or http://localhost:8000/static/. And if you wanted to access the base.css file, its location would be http://127.0.0.1:8000/static/base.css or http://localhost:8000/static/base.css.

Loading static files into Templates

Loading static files in a template is a two-step process:

There are two main ways to structure templates in a Django project, as outlined in this tutorial. Let's assume we use a templates/base.html file for a Blog project. To add our static base.css file to it we'd start by adding {% load static %} at the top of the file and then use the {% static %} tag with the path to it. Since the STATIC_URL is already set to /static/, we don't need to write the full route out of static/base.css and can instead shorten it to base.css.

<!-- templates/base.html -->
{% load static %}
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
  <title>Learn Django</title>
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="{% static 'base.css' %}">
</head>
...
</html>

You'll see the changes if you save and reload the web page. Adding links for either images in an img folder or JavaScript in a js folder would look as follows:

<img src="{% static 'img/path_to_img' %}">
<script src="{% static 'js/base.js' %}"></script>

collectstatic

Serving static files in production requires several additional steps, where confusion typically arises for Django newcomers. Local development is designed to keep things nice and easy but is far from performant. In a production environment, combining all static files in the Django project into one location and serving that a single time is more efficient.

Django comes with a built-in management command, collectstatic, that does this for us.

We need three more configurations in our settings.py file before collectstatic works properly. The first is STATICFILES_DIRS, which defines additional locations, if any, the staticfiles app should look within when running collectstatic. In our simple example, the only location for local files is the static directory, so we will set that now.

# django_project/settings.py
STATIC_URL = "static/"
STATICFILES_DIRS = [BASE_DIR / "static"]  # new

Next up is STATIC_ROOT which sets the absolute location of these collected files, typically called staticfiles. In other words, when collecstatic is run locally, it will combine all available static files, as defined by STATICFILES_DIRS, and place them within a directory called staticfiles. This is how we set that configuration.

# settings.py
STATIC_URL = "static/"
STATICFILES_DIRS = [BASE_DIR / "static"]  
STATIC_ROOT = BASE_DIR / "staticfiles"  # new

The final step is STORAGES, a dictionary of all the storages to be used with Django. By default, it is implicitly set with a default configuration for files and staticfiles for managing static files. Let's make that explicit for now in our django_project/settings.py file.

# settings.py
STATIC_URL = "static/"
STATICFILES_DIRS = [BASE_DIR / "static"]  
STATIC_ROOT = BASE_DIR / "staticfiles" 
STORAGES = {
    "default": {
        "BACKEND": "django.core.files.storage.FileSystemStorage",
    },
    "staticfiles": {
        "BACKEND": "django.contrib.staticfiles.storage.StaticFilesStorage",
    },
}

Now we can run the command python manage.py collectstatic which will create a new staticfiles directory.

(.venv) $ python manage.py collectstatic

If you look within it you'll see that staticfiles also has folders for admin (the built-in admin has its own static files), staticfiles.json, and whatever directories are in your static folder.

If you now add a new static file to the static directory it will immediately be available for local usage. It is only for production where the file won't be present unless you run python manage.py collectstatic each and every time. For this reason, running collectstatic is typically added to deployment pipelines and is done by default on Heroku.

As a brief recap:

Production

Even though we've configured our Django project to collect static files properly, there's one more step involved which is not included in the official Django docs. That is the configuration of WhiteNoise to serve the static files in production. The first step is to install the latest version of the package:

(.venv) $ python -m pip install whitenoise==6.0.0

Then in the django_project/settings.py file make three changes:

It should look like the following:

# settings.py
INSTALLED_APPS = [
    "django.contrib.admin",
    "django.contrib.auth",
    "django.contrib.contenttypes",
    "django.contrib.sessions",
    "django.contrib.messages",
    "whitenoise.runserver_nostatic",  # new
    "django.contrib.staticfiles",
]

MIDDLEWARE = [
    "django.middleware.security.SecurityMiddleware",
    "django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware",
    "whitenoise.middleware.WhiteNoiseMiddleware",  # new
    "django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware",
    "django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware",
    "django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware",
    "django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware",
    "django.middleware.clickjacking.XFrameOptionsMiddleware",
]

...

STATIC_URL = "static/"
STATICFILES_DIRS = [BASE_DIR / "static"]  
STATIC_ROOT = BASE_DIR / "staticfiles"
STORAGES = {
    "default": {
        "BACKEND": "django.core.files.storage.FileSystemStorage",
    },
    "staticfiles": {  
        "BACKEND": "whitenoise.storage.CompressedManifestStaticFilesStorage",  # new
    },
}

That's it! Run python manage.py collectstatic again to store the files using WhiteNoise. Then, deploy with confidence to the hosting platform of your choice.

CDNs

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are helpful on very high-traffic sites where performance is a concern. Rather than serving static files from your Django server, you post them on a dedicated CDN network and then call them. The official WhiteNoise documentation has additional instructions.

Conclusion

Configuring static files is a core part of any Django project. If you'd like to learn more about working with static and media files, check out the Django File/Image Uploads Tutorial.

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