A modern Django project is a collection of apps. Files are looked up under conventional paths within apps. Modules (especially the settings module) can live anywhere on $PYTHONPATH. Actually, there's not such thing as a project root.
For instance, instead of using TEMPLATE_DIRS, project-wide templates can go into an "myproject" application. You need one anyway as soon as you write a custom template tag or filter. There are two special cases that don't fit into apps: STATIC_ROOT and MEDIA_ROOT. (Technically, there's ALLOWED_INCLUDE_ROOTS too, but it isn't commonly used.) Static files are collected from the apps into STATIC_ROOT that is then served by the web server. To avoid accidentally leaking Python code over the web, it's a good idea to keep this directory outside of your source tree. Media files are written by the application server into MEDIA_ROOT. It's a good idea to put them on a separate partition (DoS by filling up / isn't fun), or at least in a directory outside of your source tree, which must be read-only for the web server. For local development, it's certainly fine to store the code in /home/myproject, compile the static files in /home/myproject/static, and uploading the media files in /home/myproject/media, and it's convenient to express that with relative paths. But it's hardly a best practice in production — at least, not until you've spent 30 seconds thinking about it. Django leaves it up to the developer to structure the settings for different environments. This means we cannot provide a "development only" settings template. For these reasons, I'm against codifying PROJECT_ROOT and relative paths in Django's default settings files. No amount of "+1 because I'm doing it already" or blog posts will make it a best practice in production. And developers will keep doing it until sysadmins tell them not to. -- Aymeric. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers" group. To post to this group, send email to django-developers@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers?hl=en.
