On Static Media and Django

We all know not to serve static media (images, CSS, Javascript, etc.) in production directly from Django. Thankfully, Django gives us some nice settings like MEDIA_URL and MEDIA_ROOT to make serving them a lot less painless. Lately, however, I’ve come to realize that these settings shouldn’t really apply to all static media.

Not All Static Media Is Created Equal

Static media really comes in two flavors. Media that is part of your site like your stylesheets and user generated media or files that are uploaded to the site once it is live. We don’t want to serve all this media from the same place for a couple of reasons:

1. Our source checkouts shouldn’t be crufted up by stuff our users are uploading
2. User generated content and source code should live in two different places on the filesystem

We could fix the first problem with some .gitignore, but that doesn’t solve the filesystem issue.

Solution: Segregate Your Static Files

The answer is to segregate your static files. Django already does this with ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX. We use two additional settings in our Django projects, STATIC_URL and STATIC_ROOT. This lets us put user generated content in MEDIA_ROOT outside our project while still serving STATIC_ROOT from inside our source repo.

Implementation

We use Nginx as a front-end proxy to most of our sites and add this stanza to serve all our static media:

location /s/ {
    alias   /var/www/domainname.com/;
}

MEDIA_ROOT = '/var/www/domainname.com/media/'
MEDIA_URL = '/s/media/'

STATIC_ROOT = '/path/to/project_src/static/'
STATIC_URL = '/s/static/'

ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX = '/s/admin/'

from django.conf import settings
if getattr(settings, 'LOCAL_DEV', False):
    urlpatterns += patterns('django.views.static',
        (r'^%s(?P<path>.*)' % settings.STATIC_URL, 'serve',
         {'document_root': settings.STATIC_ROOT}),
        (r'^%s(?P<path>.*)' % settings.MEDIA_URL, 'serve',
         {'document_root': settings.MEDIA_ROOT}),
    )