Summary

In this chapter, we showed you how to use Django’s staticfiles app to find and serve static files. We used the built-in static view to serve these files with the Django dev server in DEBUG mode. We showed different places to store static files by using a directory that is global to the project or in a specific directory for the application; global resources should be stored in the former while application-specific resources should be stored in the latter. We showed the importance of namespacing static file directories to prevent conflicts. After serving the assets, we used the static tag to include them in our template. We then demoed how the collectstatic command copies all the assets into the STATIC_ROOT directory, for production deployment. We showed how to use the findstatic command to debug the loading of static files. To invalidate caches automatically, we looked at using ManifestFilesStorage to add a hash of the file’s content to the static file URL. Finally...