Trying to serve django static files on development server - not found

Question

I\'ve followed the instructions in this question, the documentation, and I\'ve even looked at this one, but so far I\'m unable to get at my static files using python m

Answer 1

Django's handling of static files continue to be slightly confusing, particularly in terms of the naming of relevant settings.

The short answer is to move your static files; instead of

/home/wayne/programming/somesite/static

put them in

/home/wayne/programming/somesite/yourapp/static

(where "yourapp" is obviously the name of your main application).

The longer answer is that I think you've (understandably) become confused about the various settings. STATIC_ROOT only refers to the location where your static files should end up after running manage.py collectstatic. You don't need this set (as you shouldn't really need collectstatic) when developing locally. Either way, STATIC_ROOT should always refer to an empty directory.

Your STATICFILES_DIRS setting would almost work, except that you've told Django there are two paths where it should find static files

/home/wayne/programming/somesite/static/styles
/home/wayne/programming/somesite/static/admin

so when you do {% static "styles/main.css" %} it will look for

/home/wayne/programming/somesite/static/styles/styles/main.css
/home/wayne/programming/somesite/static/admin/styles/main.css

and will obviously not find them. What might work is

STATICFILES_DIRS = ('/home/wayne/programming/somesite/static',)

but there's no need to do that, as you can just rely on django.contrib.staticfiles.finders.AppDirectoriesFinder (in the default STATICFILES_FINDERS) and move your static files to an app directory.

Hope this clears things up a little.