Question

I’m developing with Django on my computer, and the location of all my static files are different than on my host. Is there a way to make this a configurable parameter?

For example, on my computer, I have to include jquery.js in my templates, which is located in /includes/jquery.js, but on my host, it’s located at ../static/jquery.js, but I don’t want to make all of these changes for every template page.

Answer 1

There are two questions here. The first is how to configure where Django finds static files, and the URL prefixes used when linking to/including static resources. The answer to that question is to use the MEDIA_URL and MEDIA_ROOT settings to control the URL mapping and on-disk path info for static media. See the Django setting reference docs for more info on that task.

Then, your second implicit question is how to maintain different settings for your local development environment and the production deployment. There are many different “recipes” for maintaining multiple parallel configuration environments for Django projects, but I find the simplest method to simply be adding something like this to the bottom of my settings.py:

try:
  from settings_local.py import *
except ImportError:
  pass

Then, if either system (dev or production) has a file called settings_local.py in the root project directory, configuration options set there will override those made in the main settings.py. I then usually add the local file to the ignore list for my version control, and put machine-dependent or security-sensitive data (like database passwords) into it, while the bulk of the configuration can live in the main version-controlled settings.py.