Question

In my Django project, I have static folders for each app, app1/static/, app2/static, etc. It works fine with the development server.

However when I switch to use Django development server + nginx through fastcgi. There’s a problem that I can only map /static to one location. Is it possible, in Nginx, to map app1/static/, app2/static, etc to url /static.

The following config does not seem to work. What’s the correct way to achieve it? Thanks

location ^~ /static/ {
    root "app1/static/";app2/static;
    }

Answer 1

You should follow https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/static-files/.

What it says is that you serve your files from static/ sub-folders in your app-folders. In your templates you use {{ STATIC_URL }} or in older versions {% get_static_prefix %}. In debug mode under the development server Django will directly serve the files from the static sub-folders in your app-folders.

When you switch to nginx, you run collectstatic as Aviral suggests. This collects all files from the static/ sub-folders into the STATIC_ROOT folder. In order to not have all files in one folder, I would suggest to use static/app-name folders in your apps. In this case STATIC_ROOT will be populated with distinct app-name sub-folders and the static files for each app are separated. The templates must refer to files like {{ STATIC_URL }}/app-name/my_static_image.jpg.

Your nginx config should than simply look like:

location ^~ /static {
     root <your STATIC_ROOT path>;
}