Question

I’m trying to render static files locally in development. I have followed the rules and placed stylesheets in /static/ in my Django project folder, setting STATIC_URL = '/static/'. Using the {{ STATIC_URL }} template tag works and the paths rendered in the document head point to the correct directory (as far as I can tell), e.g.:

http://localhost:8000/static/css/bootstrap.min.css

This returns a 404, and of course, there’s no styling.

I started with /static and its contents (i.e. /css/bootstrap.min.css) in the project root folder. I then copied it and its entire contents to all the other app directories, to try different places Django might be looking. Still 404.

Relevant settings in settings.py:

DEBUG = True

STATIC_URL = '/static/'

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.sites',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',
    'django.contrib.humanize',
    'south',
    'users',
    'registration',
    'django_extensions',
    'django.contrib.admin',
)

What’s going wrong?

Matt

Answer 1

What does your urls.py look like? Have you forgotten to include a static files url? If you look at the documentation on serving static files https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/static-files/#serving-static-files-in-development it suggests putting the following in urls.py

from django.contrib.staticfiles.urls import staticfiles_urlpatterns

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

urlpatterns += staticfiles_urlpatterns()