Turn off caching of static files in Django development server

Question

Is there an easy way to turn off caching of static files in Django\'s development server?

I\'m starting the server with the standard command:

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Answer 1

Django's contrib.staticfiles app automatically serves staticfiles for you by overriding the runserver command. With this configuration you can't control the way it serves the static files.

You can prevent the staticfiles app from serving the static files by adding the --nostatic option to the runserver command:

./manage.py runserver --nostatic

Then you can write an url config to manually serve the static files with headers that prevent the browser from caching the response:

from django.conf import settings
from django.contrib.staticfiles.views import serve as serve_static
from django.views.decorators.cache import never_cache

urlpatterns = patterns('', )

if settings.DEBUG:
    urlpatterns += patterns('',
        url(r'^static/(?P.*)$', never_cache(serve_static)),
    )

If you want your manage.py runserver command to have the --nostatic option on by default, you can put this in your manage.py:

if '--nostatic' not in sys.argv:
    sys.argv.append('--nostatic')