Unit: Serving django static files

[R4z0R7]

Hello,

I noticed a problem with the static files in django applications. I have the following django app:

    "django": {
        "group": "djangotest",
        "home": "/home/djangotest/djenv",
        "module": "newtest.wsgi",
        "path": "/home/djangotest/newtest",
        "processes": 1,
        "type": "python 3.6",
        "user": "djangotest"
    }

This is a freshly-installed django 2.1 with no customisations. Python version is 3.6.8. The home page works fine but the stylesheets for the admin app return 404s.
I observed the same behaviour with images and static files in another django application, and I decided to test it with a clean installation of django.

The static URLs seem to be treated like standard urls and if they don't match anything in the urls.py file, they return a 404 instead of retrieving the file.

This is the error message from Django:

"Request Method: | GET
http://django.test/static/admin/css/base.css

Using the URLconf defined in newtest.urls, Django tried these URL patterns, in this order:
admin/
The current path, static/admin/css/base.css, didn't match any of these."

In Nginx Unit's access log, I see this:
"Not Found: /static/admin/css/base.css"

Static files are accessible when serving django with the built-in server for debugging and development. This only happens when the application is served by Unit.

I tried setting different environment variables for the application in Unit's configuration, such as STATIC_ROOT, STATIC_URL, STATIC_DIRS, DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE, etc., but none of these helped. Images and static files in the STATIC_ROOT directory would still not show.

Any ideas what might be wrong with the setup ?

[VBart]

Serving static files within Python application is very ineffective. Therefore Django serves static files only with internal development server, that isn't supposed for production use.

See: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/stable/howto/static-files/deployment/

[akshaybabloo]

Use Nginx to serve static files

[olivermussell]

For a Django application you shouldn’t serve static files from the WSGI application directly. So for example if you were running Django in production you might use uWSGI to run the WSGI app and NGINX to serve static files.

However, since Unit 1.11.0 you can serve static files from Unit.

Here’s an example config that would serve static files from the /home/django/static/ directory for requests to example.com/static/. All other requests would be directed to the django application. Obviously you can change the matchers and static root path as necessary.

{
        "listeners": {
                "127.0.0.1:8000": {
                        "pass": "routes"
                }
        },

        "routes": [
            {
                "match": {
                    "host": [ “example.com” ],
                    "uri": "/static/*"
                },

                "action": {
                    "share": "/home/django/“
                }
            },
            {
                "action": {
                    "pass": "applications/django”
                }
            }
        ],

        "applications": {
        "django": {
            "group": "djangotest",
            "home": "/home/djangotest/djenv",
            "module": "newtest.wsgi",
            "path": "/home/djangotest/newtest",
            "processes": 1,
            "type": "python 3.6",
            "user": "djangotest"
        }
        }
}