Django staticfiles app help

Question

I\'ve having a little issue with Django\'s staticfiles app.

I have added

\'django.contrib.staticfiles\',

to my INSTALLED_APPS and

Answer 1

If you want just a solution - scroll down to the "Solution".

Overview

I was discovering the same problem yesterday. Here is what I found:

All you need is appropriate static finder, that will find your STATIC_ROOT and all its contents, but there is no such finder. Here are default finders:

• django.contrib.staticfiles.finders.AppDirectoriesFinder - search installed django applications dirs for 'static' folder, but most of them use obsolete 'media' folders for now.

• django.contrib.staticfiles.finders.FileSystemFinder - use all dirs mentioned in the STATICFILES_DIRS, but you can't add STATIC_ROOT into it.

• django.contrib.staticfiles.finders.DefaultStorageFinder - search static in your DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE which is django.core.files.storage.FileSystemStorage by default and it points to your MEDIA_ROOT

Solution

That's all, no additional choices. There are no choices to use STATIC_ROOT for now (in Django 1.3).
So I've just wrote my own custom finder for these needs:

• My custom static finder file: finders.py:

  from django.core.files.storage import FileSystemStorage
  from django.contrib.staticfiles.finders import BaseStorageFinder
  from django.conf import settings
  
  class StaticFinder(BaseStorageFinder):
      storage = FileSystemStorage(settings.STATIC_ROOT, settings.STATIC_URL)
  

• settings.py:

  STATICFILES_FINDERS = (
      'finders.StaticFinder',
  )
  

• If you want to use it with another finders - I suggest to put them after it inside STATICFILES_FINDERS

And remember: this solution should be used only in development needs and never on production!