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:

<

Answer 1

In newer versions of Django a very simple solution is modify the project urls like so:

from django.conf.urls.static import static
from django.contrib.staticfiles.views import serve
from django.views.decorators.cache import cache_control
from django.conf import settings

# YOUR urlpatterns here... 

if settings.DEBUG:
    urlpatterns += static(settings.STATIC_URL, view=cache_control(no_cache=True, must_revalidate=True)(serve))

I arrived at this by looking at how staticfiles modifies the urls automatically and just adding a view decorator. I really don't understand why this isn't the default as this is for development ONLY. The view is able to properly handle a "If-Modified-Since" HTTP header so a request is always made but contents are only transferred on changes (judged by looking at the modification timestamp on the file).

For this to work you must add --nostatic when using runserver, otherwise the above changes are simply ignored.

IMPORTANT EDIT: What I had before didn't work because I wasn't using --nostatic and the never_cache decorator also included no-store which meant unchanged files were always being re-transferred instead of returning 304 Not Modified