Django: how do you serve media / stylesheets and link to them within templates

Question

Variations of this question have been asked, but I\'m still unable to get my stylesheets to load correctly when my templates are rendered.

I\'m attempting to serve s

Answer 1

I usually make my own Template simple tag because Django isn't giving CSS/JavaScript files. Apache does it so my media url is usually http://static.mysite.com.

yourApp/templatetags/media_url.py:

from django.template import Library
from yourapp.settings import MEDIA_URL
register = Library()

@register.simple_tag
def media_url():
    return MEDIA_URL

And in my template file:

{% load media_url %}
<link href="{{ media_url }}css/main.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">

You could also make your own context preprocessor to add the media_url variable in every template.

Answer 2

I just use absolute naming. Unless you're running the site in a deep path (or even if you are), I'd drop the .. and go for something like:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/media/styles.css">

Answer 3

I just had to figure this out myself.

settings.py:

MEDIA_ROOT = 'C:/Server/Projects/project_name/static/'
MEDIA_URL = '/static/'
ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX = '/media/'

urls.py:

from django.conf import settings
...
if settings.DEBUG:
    urlpatterns += patterns('',
        (r'^static/(?P<path>.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve', {'document_root': settings.MEDIA_ROOT}),
    )

template file:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/static/css/style.css" />

With the file located here:

"C:/Server/Projects/project_name/static/css/style.css"

Answer 4

I've got a couple of ideas, I don't know which one of them is working for me :)

Make sure to use a trailing slash, and to have this be different from the MEDIA_URL setting (since the same URL cannot be mapped onto two different sets of files).

That's from http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/settings/#admin-media-prefix

Secondly, it may be that you're confusing directories on your filesystem with url paths. Try using absolute urls, and then refine them down.

Answer 5

Another thing to add is that if you have a separate media server on a subdomain/different domain, you can disable cookies for your static media. Saves a little processing and bandwidth.

Answer 6

Django already has a context process for MEDIA_URL, see Django's documentation.

It should be availbale by default (unless you've customized CONTEXT_PROCESSORS and forgot to add it) in a RequestContext.