Phil Dawes’ Stuff

Django media-serving dev webserver

Jan 3rd, 2006 by Phil Dawes

I’ve been porting my jamvat software to the django platform. Django looks cool and I hope it will get me some

Get jamvat running on the windows platform
Provide some UI, connection pooling, security and debugging goodies
Remove some setup documentation burden (since it’s a ‘django app’)

Anyway, I was immediately hit by the problem that the django dev webserver doesn’t serve static files (i.e. js, images, css etc..), except for urls in the built-in admin server. I can’t work out why, and I can’t see why people aren’t complaining about this - I can only assume that it wants you to use a ‘proper’ webserver to serve these files even while you’re deving.

I couldn’t find a solution to this, so have written a hack that does the same thing as django does for the admin server files. Just set ‘MEDIA_ROOT’ and add a ‘DEV_MEDIA_PREFIX’ to your project settings, then run the script instead of ‘django-admin.py runserver’.

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