Unable to serve content from /static URL root in Django development server

I was absolutely baffled for a good 30 minutes, but I think my issues must be related to change in Django 1.3.

My urls.py looks like this:

if settings.DEBUG:
    urlpatterns += pat开发者_如何学运维terns('',
        (r'^static/(?P<path>.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve',
            {'document_root': settings.STATIC_ROOT, 'show_indexes': True}),
        (r'^media/(?P<path>.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve',
            {'document_root': settings.MEDIA_ROOT, 'show_indexes': True}),
        (r'^admin_media/(?P<path>.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve',
            {'document_root': settings.ADMIN_MEDIA_ROOT}),
    )

If I visit /static/, I get a file listing. For example, in my root directory there is a file "iphone.png". Going to /static/iphone.png I get a 404 message.

If I change that section to:

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

Everything related to /otherstatic/ works wonderfully.

I should also add there were no problems with /media/ or /admin_media/.

Is this related to Django's new staticfiles app? (If so, who thought it was a good idea to completely break this very simple use case?)

Thanks!

In Django 1.3, with django.contrib.staticfiles in your INSTALLED_APPS, the framework will look for all static files under all apps which have a static folder.

Read the first point, second line carefully.

Here's an example:

project/
    yourapp/
        static/
            iphone.png
    settings.py

Assuming yourapp is in your INSTALLED_APPS, you should be able to access the iphone.png image with just the following url:

http://localhost:8000/static/iphone.png

For your case, if you want staticfiles app to search for files under project/static/, you will need to add the following to your settings.py:

import os
SITE_ROOT = os.path.realpath(os.path.dirname(__file__))

STATICFILES_DIRS = (
    os.path.join(SITE_ROOT, 'static'),
)

Be careful with the above, make sure that none of the paths in STATICFILES_DIRS are a match to the path you set in STATIC_ROOT. The latter is mainly used in production.

Feel free to remove the static line from your project urls.py after setting STATICFILES_DIRS.

Unless you are using a different development server, you shouldn't need to add anything to your urlconf for serving staticfiles in your STATIC_ROOT dir.

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/staticfiles/#s-static-file-development-view

This view is automatically enabled by runserver (with a DEBUG setting set to True). To use the view with a different local development server, add the following snippet to the end of your primary URL configuration: