The `staticfiles` app¶

django.contrib.staticfiles collects static files from each of your applications (and any other places you specify) into a single location that can easily be served in production.

Settings¶

See staticfiles settings for details on the following settings:

Storages¶

`StaticFilesStorage`¶

class storage.StaticFilesStorage¶

A subclass of the FileSystemStorage storage backend that uses the STATIC_ROOT setting as the base file system location and the STATIC_URL setting respectively as the base URL.

storage.StaticFilesStorage.post_process(paths, **options)¶

If this method is defined on a storage, it’s called by the collectstatic management command after each run and gets passed the local storages and paths of found files as a dictionary, as well as the command line options. It yields tuples of three values: original_path, processed_path, processed. The path values are strings and processed is a boolean indicating whether or not the value was post-processed, or an exception if post-processing failed.

The ManifestStaticFilesStorage uses this behind the scenes to replace the paths with their hashed counterparts and update the cache appropriately.

`ManifestStaticFilesStorage`¶

class storage.ManifestStaticFilesStorage¶

A subclass of the StaticFilesStorage storage backend which stores the file names it handles by appending the MD5 hash of the file’s content to the filename. For example, the file css/styles.css would also be saved as css/styles.55e7cbb9ba48.css.

The purpose of this storage is to keep serving the old files in case some pages still refer to those files, e.g. because they are cached by you or a 3rd party proxy server. Additionally, it’s very helpful if you want to apply far future Expires headers to the deployed files to speed up the load time for subsequent page visits.

The storage backend automatically replaces the paths found in the saved files matching other saved files with the path of the cached copy (using the post_process() method). The regular expressions used to find those paths (django.contrib.staticfiles.storage.HashedFilesMixin.patterns) cover:

The @import rule and url() statement of Cascading Style Sheets.
Source map comments in CSS and JavaScript files.

Subclass ManifestStaticFilesStorage and set the support_js_module_import_aggregation attribute to True, if you want to use the experimental regular expressions to cover:

The modules import in JavaScript.
The modules aggregation in JavaScript.

For example, the 'css/styles.css' file with this content:

@import url("../admin/css/base.css");

…would be replaced by calling the url() method of the ManifestStaticFilesStorage storage backend, ultimately saving a 'css/styles.55e7cbb9ba48.css' file with the following content:

@import url("../admin/css/base.27e20196a850.css");

Usage of the integrity HTML attribute with local files

When using the optional integrity attribute within tags like <script> or <link>, its value should be calculated based on the files as they are served, not as stored in the filesystem. This is particularly important because depending on how static files are collected, their checksum may have changed (for example when using collectstatic). At the moment, there is no out-of-the-box tooling available for this.

You can change the location of the manifest file by using a custom ManifestStaticFilesStorage subclass that sets the manifest_storage argument. For example:

from django.conf import settings
from django.contrib.staticfiles.storage import (
    ManifestStaticFilesStorage,
    StaticFilesStorage,
)


class MyManifestStaticFilesStorage(ManifestStaticFilesStorage):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        manifest_storage = StaticFilesStorage(location=settings.BASE_DIR)
        super().__init__(*args, manifest_storage=manifest_storage, **kwargs)

References in comments

ManifestStaticFilesStorage doesn’t ignore paths in statements that are commented out. This may crash on the nonexistent paths. You should check and eventually strip comments.

Changed in Django 4.2:

Experimental optional support for finding paths to JavaScript modules in import and export statements was added.

storage.ManifestStaticFilesStorage.manifest_hash¶

New in Django 4.2.

This attribute provides a single hash that changes whenever a file in the manifest changes. This can be useful to communicate to SPAs that the assets on the server have changed (due to a new deployment).

storage.ManifestStaticFilesStorage.max_post_process_passes¶

Since static files might reference other static files that need to have their paths replaced, multiple passes of replacing paths may be needed until the file hashes converge. To prevent an infinite loop due to hashes not converging (for example, if 'foo.css' references 'bar.css' which references 'foo.css') there is a maximum number of passes before post-processing is abandoned. In cases with a large number of references, a higher number of passes might be needed. Increase the maximum number of passes by subclassing ManifestStaticFilesStorage and setting the max_post_process_passes attribute. It defaults to 5.

To enable the ManifestStaticFilesStorage you have to make sure the following requirements are met:

the staticfiles storage backend in STORAGES setting is set to 'django.contrib.staticfiles.storage.ManifestStaticFilesStorage'
the DEBUG setting is set to False
you’ve collected all your static files by using the collectstatic management command

Since creating the MD5 hash can be a performance burden to your website during runtime, staticfiles will automatically store the mapping with hashed names for all processed files in a file called staticfiles.json. This happens once when you run the collectstatic management command.

storage.ManifestStaticFilesStorage.manifest_strict¶

If a file isn’t found in the staticfiles.json manifest at runtime, a ValueError is raised. This behavior can be disabled by subclassing ManifestStaticFilesStorage and setting the manifest_strict attribute to False – nonexistent paths will remain unchanged.

Due to the requirement of running collectstatic, this storage typically shouldn’t be used when running tests as collectstatic isn’t run as part of the normal test setup. During testing, ensure that staticfiles storage backend in the STORAGES setting is set to something else like 'django.contrib.staticfiles.storage.StaticFilesStorage' (the default).

storage.ManifestStaticFilesStorage.file_hash(name, content=None)¶

The method that is used when creating the hashed name of a file. Needs to return a hash for the given file name and content. By default it calculates a MD5 hash from the content’s chunks as mentioned above. Feel free to override this method to use your own hashing algorithm.

`ManifestFilesMixin`¶

class storage.ManifestFilesMixin¶

Use this mixin with a custom storage to append the MD5 hash of the file’s content to the filename as ManifestStaticFilesStorage does.

Finders Module¶

staticfiles finders has a searched_locations attribute which is a list of directory paths in which the finders searched. Example usage:

from django.contrib.staticfiles import finders

result = finders.find("css/base.css")
searched_locations = finders.searched_locations

Other Helpers¶

There are a few other helpers outside of the staticfiles app to work with static files:

The django.template.context_processors.static() context processor which adds STATIC_URL to every template context rendered with RequestContext contexts.
The builtin template tag static which takes a path and urljoins it with the static prefix STATIC_URL. If django.contrib.staticfiles is installed, the tag uses the url() method of the staticfiles storage backend from STORAGES instead.
The builtin template tag get_static_prefix which populates a template variable with the static prefix STATIC_URL to be used as a variable or directly.
The similar template tag get_media_prefix which works like get_static_prefix but uses MEDIA_URL.
The staticfiles key in django.core.files.storage.storages contains a ready-to-use instance of the staticfiles storage backend.

Static file development view¶

The static files tools are mostly designed to help with getting static files successfully deployed into production. This usually means a separate, dedicated static file server, which is a lot of overhead to mess with when developing locally. Thus, the staticfiles app ships with a quick and dirty helper view that you can use to serve files locally in development.

views.serve(request, path)¶

This view function serves static files in development.

Warning

This view will only work if DEBUG is True.

That’s because this view is grossly inefficient and probably insecure. This is only intended for local development, and should never be used in production.

Note

To guess the served files’ content types, this view relies on the mimetypes module from the Python standard library, which itself relies on the underlying platform’s map files. If you find that this view doesn’t return proper content types for certain files, it is most likely that the platform’s map files are incorrect or need to be updated. This can be achieved, for example, by installing or updating the mailcap package on a Red Hat distribution, mime-support on a Debian distribution, or by editing the keys under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT in the Windows registry.

This view is automatically enabled by runserver (with a DEBUG setting set to True). To use the view with a different local development server, add the following snippet to the end of your primary URL configuration:

from django.conf import settings
from django.contrib.staticfiles import views
from django.urls import re_path

if settings.DEBUG:
    urlpatterns += [
        re_path(r"^static/(?P<path>.*)$", views.serve),
    ]

Note, the beginning of the pattern (r'^static/') should be your STATIC_URL setting.

Since this is a bit finicky, there’s also a helper function that’ll do this for you:

urls.staticfiles_urlpatterns()¶

This will return the proper URL pattern for serving static files to your already defined pattern list. Use it like this:

from django.contrib.staticfiles.urls import staticfiles_urlpatterns

# ... the rest of your URLconf here ...

urlpatterns += staticfiles_urlpatterns()

This will inspect your STATIC_URL setting and wire up the view to serve static files accordingly. Don’t forget to set the STATICFILES_DIRS setting appropriately to let django.contrib.staticfiles know where to look for files in addition to files in app directories.

Warning

This helper function will only work if DEBUG is True and your STATIC_URL setting is neither empty nor a full URL such as http://static.example.com/.

That’s because this view is grossly inefficient and probably insecure. This is only intended for local development, and should never be used in production.

Specialized test case to support ‘live testing’¶

class testing.StaticLiveServerTestCase¶

This unittest TestCase subclass extends django.test.LiveServerTestCase.

Just like its parent, you can use it to write tests that involve running the code under test and consuming it with testing tools through HTTP (e.g. Selenium, PhantomJS, etc.), because of which it’s needed that the static assets are also published.

But given the fact that it makes use of the django.contrib.staticfiles.views.serve() view described above, it can transparently overlay at test execution-time the assets provided by the staticfiles finders. This means you don’t need to run collectstatic before or as a part of your tests setup.

Django 5.0.2.dev20240124114817 documentation

The `staticfiles` app¶

Settings¶

Management Commands¶

`collectstatic`¶

Customizing the ignored pattern list¶

`findstatic`¶

`runserver`¶

Storages¶

`StaticFilesStorage`¶

`ManifestStaticFilesStorage`¶

`ManifestFilesMixin`¶

Finders Module¶

Other Helpers¶

Static file development view¶

Specialized test case to support ‘live testing’¶

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Last update:

Django 5.0.2.dev20240124114817 documentation

The staticfiles app¶

Settings¶

Management Commands¶

collectstatic¶

Customizing the ignored pattern list¶

findstatic¶

runserver¶

Storages¶

StaticFilesStorage¶

ManifestStaticFilesStorage¶

ManifestFilesMixin¶

Finders Module¶

Other Helpers¶

Static file development view¶

Specialized test case to support ‘live testing’¶

Last update:

The `staticfiles` app¶

`collectstatic`¶

`findstatic`¶

`runserver`¶

`StaticFilesStorage`¶

`ManifestStaticFilesStorage`¶

`ManifestFilesMixin`¶