Considering static files like CSS, JavaScript, or images, Django provides a built-in way to handle these files for fast and efficient delivery. The Django “Static Files” app is useful when developing locally, and it works well for deployment as well.
The first step is to install the static files app and add it to your installed apps in the settings.py file. If you’ve started a new Django project, the static files app will be installed by default. It will be included in the project’s settings under the installed apps section as ‘django.contrib.staticfiles’.
Next, you can specify the location of the static files in your project by using the `STATIC_URL` in the settings file to define the URL to access the static files. For instance, if you used:
```
STATIC_URL = ‘/static/‘
```
Django will expect to find the static files in a directory named static in each application.
If you want to use a different directory name other than ‘static’, Django allows you to do that using the `STATICFILES_DIRS` setting. For instance:
```
STATICFILES_DIRS = [os.path.join(BASE_DIR, ‘my_static’), ]
STATIC_URL = ‘/static/‘
```
Here, Django will expect to find the static files in the `my_static` directory in your project root directory.
In the development environment, Django will automatically serve the static files found in the static subdirectory of each application, in a manner suitable for development. However, this method is inefficacious for production.
To handle different environments, Django provides the `collectstatic` management command. This command will copy all static files from your applications into a single directory that can be served in production by a web server or a CDN. You can specify the path for this directory using the `STATIC_ROOT` setting:
```
STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, ‘staticfiles’)
```
In your HTML, static files must be loaded using the `{% load static }` directive. And the files are referenced using the `{ static “…” %}` template tag. For instance:
```
{% load static %}
```
Remember this method only works if DEBUG is set to True for security reasons. Therefore, in production, you might have to configure your server to serve the static files.
All these pieces of information, method, and directives are fully documented in Django’s official documentation (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/howto/static-files/).
Please note that these ways of serving static files might not be the most efficient for a heavy traffic production site. For that purpose, it’s common to use dedicated static files server or CDN services like AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, or a similar service.
