Question

I’m preparing to deploy my Django app and I noticed that when I change the ‘DEBUG’ setting to False, all references to static files (i.e., JavaScript, CSS, etc..) result in HTTP 500 errors.

Any idea what’s causing that issue (and how to fix it)?

Answer 1

I would highly recommend letting your web server handle the static requests, without getting to Django. In my urls.py, I only add the static request handler when debug is set to True.

Technically, Django serving the static works fine though. Definitely read the short docs page, http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/static-files/. You’ll want to use an entry like this in urls.py

(r'^static/(?P<path>.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve',     {'document_root': '/path/to/media'})