🎒 Everyone struggles with Django's static files

Josh Thomas did a great job documenting and walking us through how he prefers to set up static files in his Django projects last week in his How I organize staticfiles in my Django projects article.

Josh recommends the following config and naming convention:

# settings.py

# django.contrib.staticfiles
STATIC_ROOT = BASE_DIR / "staticfiles"

STATIC_URL = "/static/"

STATICFILES_DIRS = [
    BASE_DIR / "static" / "dist",
    BASE_DIR / "static" / "public",
]

Overall, this is very similar to what I do, but I settled into calling my STATICFILES_DIRS folder assets or frontend. After seeing Josh’s example, I changed this value to staticfiles to match the setting variable more closely.

Updated config

# settings.py

# django.contrib.staticfiles

# INPUT: Where to look for static files
STATICFILES_DIRS = [
    BASE_DIR / "staticfiles" / "dist",
    BASE_DIR / "staticfiles" / "public",
]

# OUTPUT: Where to put and look for static files to serve
STATIC_ROOT = BASE_DIR / "static"

# SERVE: Where to serve static files
STATIC_URL = "/static/"

This also changes our .gitignore to match our new settings. Since all of our files will be collected by Django and placed into the static folder, we can tell git to ignore this folder.

We can also ignore the staticfiles/dist/ folder if we have an asset building pipeline and need a place to store the intermediate files.

#.gitignore
static/
staticfiles/dist/
# Optionally, to universally ignore all 'dist' directories:
# dist