Re: Managing static media urls
I think the question at hand is not where to store and serve the media files, but how to write an app that can easily support accessing media files from different urls. I had this same issue between my development and production apache servers: Dev Site localhost/mysite/images/whatever.gif Production mysite.com/images/whatever.gif And even the occasional development on my laptop on the road localhost/~myuser/mysite/images/whatever.gif This was never a problem in my previous dev environment (php) because I'd always just use relative urls like: But with django's more flexible url mapping, I need to make all the links absolute. The most frequent suggestion is just to define a setting such as the MEDIA_ROOT that can be set to "/images" on my production server, "/mysite/images" on my dev and then "~myuser/mysite/images" on the laptop example. Looking at ruby on rails, they seem to have some template tag equivalent that does url generation for you automatically (stolen from the rails tutorial): <%= link_to recipe.title. Perhaps django could use something similar?
Re: Managing static media urls
Afternoon wrote: I'm not just using this for media (despite the subject line!). I also the URLBASE for building absolute urls in models and in templates. MEDIA_URL generally ends up as something like: MEDIA_URL = URLBASE + "/media/" Yes, I also hit the same problem, but because I have control of my DNS, I use sub domains for stuff like that. So http://boringsite/newcoolthing/ becomes http://newcoolthing.boringsite/. -- Nebojša Đorđević - nesh Studio Quattro - Niš - SCG http://studioquattro.biz/forum/ http://djnesh.blogspot.com/ | http://djnesh-django.blogspot.com/ | http://djangoutils.python-hosting.com/ Registered Linux User 282159 [http://counter.li.org]
Re: Managing static media urls
I'm not just using this for media (despite the subject line!). I also the URLBASE for building absolute urls in models and in templates. MEDIA_URL generally ends up as something like: MEDIA_URL = URLBASE + "/media/" Something like Rails' routing would be really interesting for me, but I confess I don't really know much about their solution, or what would be a good fit here. On 19 Jan 2006, at 19:05, Nebojša Đorđević wrote: Well, if all of your sites are separate django projects that's easy, you already have a (static) dir pointed by your MEDIA_URL, so: Afternoon, man about the Internet -- http://aftnn.org/
Re: Managing static media urls
I think there are a few ways of doing this in previous messages, but
here's what has worked for me, using a custom context processor.
In settings, I add whatever custom variables I want, including this:
APP_BASE = "http://www.example.com/;
I have an app called home, and in the views.py I put this:
---
"""
A request processor that returns dictionary to be merged into a
template context. Function takes the request object as its only
parameter
and returns a dictionary to add to the context.
These are referenced from the setting TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS and
used by DjangoContext.
"""
from django.conf.settings import APP_BASE
def set_vars(request):
"""
Returns custom context variables required by this app from
settings.py
"""
context_extras = {}
context_extras['APP_BASE'] = APP_BASE
return context_extras
-
You could add other custom variables to this.
In settings again, I added to...
TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
...
"django.models.home.set_vars",
)
In the template use
...
The one gotcha with this is you must remember to use DjangoContext in
your views:
from django.core.extensions import DjangoContext as Context
But then you have to do that to use any of the template context
processors.
Derek
Re: Managing static media urls
I'd like to have a solution to this problem too. My specific problem is that I have a bunch of sites in development on my laptop: http://localhost/coolsite/ http://localhost/boringsite/ http://localhost/newhomepage/ And these then get deployed to production servers: http://coolsite.com/ http://boringsite/newcoolthing/ http://homepage.org/ I solve it right now by adding a setting, URLBASE, and then doing circles to get it into everything, mainly with lots of extra_context stuff to push it through generic views into templates. I'm aware this is sub-optimal. One solution is to use the sites functionality - will Django bork if my site url is localhost/folder? The other is to use a middleware or context processor to pull in URLBASE. Ben On 15 Jan 2006, at 4:17, Greg wrote: Thanks for the advice guys. Amit, yeah I should have mentioned that I totally agree that django shouldn't serve static files in a production environment. And keeping a /static/ directory sounds like a pretty good way to do that. I started writing something more like Andy's #2 suggestion... a way to abstract the media root so it doesn't have to be hardcoded all over my templates. I made a tag to generate static URLs, and hacked the django code in order to remember a template's application's settings like the location of the media directory (if the template belongs to a application, that is). It works really well but I imagine there are various kinds of issues to consider for a facility like that. And you're right Andy, it's not really a ideal solution unless all the apps you're using use it. Well, it sounds like the dev team has their hands full right now with more important things like magic-removal and 1.0, but maybe I'll float this idea after that. Mostly I just wanted to make sure I wasn't high or completely missing the point. Afternoon, man about the Internet -- http://aftnn.org/
Re: Managing static media urls
Thanks for the advice guys. Amit, yeah I should have mentioned that I totally agree that django shouldn't serve static files in a production environment. And keeping a /static/ directory sounds like a pretty good way to do that. I started writing something more like Andy's #2 suggestion... a way to abstract the media root so it doesn't have to be hardcoded all over my templates. I made a tag to generate static URLs, and hacked the django code in order to remember a template's application's settings like the location of the media directory (if the template belongs to a application, that is). It works really well but I imagine there are various kinds of issues to consider for a facility like that. And you're right Andy, it's not really a ideal solution unless all the apps you're using use it. Well, it sounds like the dev team has their hands full right now with more important things like magic-removal and 1.0, but maybe I'll float this idea after that. Mostly I just wanted to make sure I wasn't high or completely missing the point.
Re: Managing static media urls
Amit Upadhyay wrote:
> Static files are best served by basic http servers and not django.
> Django tries to support serving static files, but that is only for
> convenience in development. Just now I finished deploying a django
> project under mod_pythong/apache, and my approach was to setup a /static
> url pointing to a directory containing static files and I setup django's
> static file serving view for that, I did that till the development
> lasted, and then I moved it to apache, and put a:
>
>
> SetHandler None
>
>
This is the exact approach that I use, but it doesn't avoid the issue
that Greg is talking about. That is; a series of static-file URLs are
likely to be associated with any given application, and the path to them
isn't necessarily going to be the same for each installation of that
application (because, amongst other reasons, there are many different
ways they could be deployed - as you've just shown).
Personally, I'm happy using root-relative URLs for the moment. The
resulting directory structure isn't overly complicated, so could be
easily replicated. However, I can think of a couple of approaches to
ease the problem:
1) Make it a standards that your apps will have all their media in
/static/appname/. This isn't hard to do, and produces an easily portable
directory tree. Root-relative (or absolute) again, though.
2) Create all your templates so that static media urls look like
"{{base_url}}/image.png". Define a constant at the top of the file
defining your views, and store the appropriate base URL in it. Pass this
constant into your template renderer. This means that where you are
storing your static files is only hardcoded once, and can easily be changed.
In fact, I think I've seen a couple of people write function decorators
and other nifty tricks specifically to do things like render templates
with additional variables... just a thought.
The problem with both of these approaches is that if you're
using an app (or several) that you haven't written yourself, they won't
necessarily follow this standard, and could conflict.
-Andy
Re: Managing static media urls
On 1/14/06, Greg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: your folder structure. This issue seems especially pertinent for Djangobecause although the mechanism for assembling several apps together onone server is a sweet way to make it easy to combine and reconfigure applications, having to specify a single global MEDIA_ROOT/MEDIA_URLkind of limits it. You can't just put static files in the samedirectory as the template files, like JSP developers (for instance)often do. It'd be convenient if each app had "media" subdirectory or something to go with its models, views, and templates. And actually,the admin app is an excellent example of this! But admin has to haveits own special setting (ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX) and handler to make itwork. Is there any suggested strategy for how other apps can have their own media directories too? What's the common practice? Static files are best served by basic http servers and not django. Django tries to support serving static files, but that is only for convenience in development. Just now I finished deploying a django project under mod_pythong/apache, and my approach was to setup a /static url pointing to a directory containing static files and I setup django's static file serving view for that, I did that till the development lasted, and then I moved it to apache, and put a: SetHandler Nonelike directive in apache conf to bypass django for them. I have setup apache to server / using django. /static contained directores for different application, modified ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX to point to this location, and developed my other application assuming my static files will be available at /static/myapp/. The only thing I am missing in this approach is: my 404 views are not called when some file is unavailable, and ugly looking apache default comes up. I can change apache's 404 page to someother, but it seems it has to be static html file, not explored it much, but then its not really too bad. -- Amit UpadhyayBlog: http://www.rootshell.be/~upadhyay+91-9867-359-701
Managing static media urls
Andy Shaw posed an interesting question in the topic "CSS and PNG files in templates" (in this discussion group)... what kind of URL do you put in a template when you want to refer to a static file? If you use URLs that encode too much information (like a hostname or an absolute path), then it becomes a PITA to move the app to another host, or to rearrange your folder structure. This issue seems especially pertinent for Django because although the mechanism for assembling several apps together on one server is a sweet way to make it easy to combine and reconfigure applications, having to specify a single global MEDIA_ROOT/MEDIA_URL kind of limits it. You can't just put static files in the same directory as the template files, like JSP developers (for instance) often do. It'd be convenient if each app had "media" subdirectory or something to go with its models, views, and templates. And actually, the admin app is an excellent example of this! But admin has to have its own special setting (ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX) and handler to make it work. Is there any suggested strategy for how other apps can have their own media directories too? What's the common practice?
