What does Django do with `MEDIA_ROOT`?

Question

What does Django do with MEDIA_ROOT exactly? I never understood it. Since Django itself doesn\'t serve static media, and you have to set up apache or something

Answer 1

When you creates a model with ImageField or FileField attributes, you should pass the upload_to argument. That is a relative path will be appended to your MEDIA_ROOT path and there will be save and retrieve that files.

Answer 2

You're not the only one who wonders; check out Django ticket #10650. Based on the comments by Django developers there, I think this pretty much sums up what MEDIA_ROOT is used for:

Unfortunately, Django is also at fault for being far too vague in its docs about what MEDIA_ROOT and MEDIA_URL are used for. Searching through Django's code confirms that MEDIA_ROOT & MEDIA_URL are used for file upload, and that MEDIA_URL is provided as a convenience to templates via the default context processors (available when using RequestContext??).

Answer 3

It appears to be used by some classes in Django as a default -- for instance, FileSystemStorage uses it as the default place to store files.