On Aug 23, 2005, at 6:12 AM, Andy Shaw wrote:
Or more simply put, the Django web server doesn't serve your media
(e.g. images, PNG, CSS) and there isn't a plan to (the related ticket
is marked as WONTFIX). Which majorly blows IMHO.
It does seem somewhat contradictory to refuse to let the built-in
server serve static media in general whilst hacking it so that it
does output the admin media. Presumably this is so that the admin
CSS/Javascript is available, and so the admin works properly - but
what happens when the same features are used in application views?
The test server is no longer particularly useful to test
applications with.
The point is that serving media from Django is a Bad Idea(tm), and
one of the philosophies behind Django is that we want to make it
easier to do the right thing than to do the wrong thing. I'm not
going to go into why serving media from an application server is bad
unless someone really wants to discuss it; just trust me when I say
that in the long run you'll be much happier if you take the 30
seconds to set up a static directory or subdomain to serve media from.
That said...
It should be very easy to write a "static directory" view; something
like the following should get you started::
import os
MIME_TYPES = {
'.png' : 'image/png',
# ...
}
def static_directory(request, base_directory, url):
p = os.path.join(base_directory, url)
if os.path.exists(p):
mimetype = MIME_TYPES.get(on.path.splitext(p)[1], 'text/
plain'))
return HttpResponse(open(p).read(), mimetype=mimetype)
else:
raise Http404
Then in a urlconf you could do::
urlpatterns = patterns(
('media/(?P<url>.*)$', "path.to.my.module.static_directory",
{"base_directory" : "/home/media/"})
)
Again, this is a BAD IDEA (and looking at the code should start to
tell you why), but if you don't care about doing it right the above
view should get you started.
Jacob
