Serving static media during Django development: Why not MEDIA_ROOT?

Question

I read this guide about serving static media with Django during development.

I noticed that MEDIA_URL and MEDIA_ROOT were not used in this.

Answer 1

The Django docs recommend the following approach I've modified for my use case:

urlpatterns = [
    # url patterns
]

from django.conf import settings

if settings.DEBUG:
    from django.conf.urls.static import static
    urlpatterns += static(settings.MEDIA_URL, document_root=settings.MEDIA_ROOT)

Note: the above assumes you've set your MEDIA_URL and MEDIA_ROOT correctly

... and here's the djangodocs linkslap.