Django: serving ADMIN media files

Question

I've been successfully serving media files for the normal MEDIA files, but when I tried serving admin media files, I failed. please kindly help me locating the problem, as I've tried to troubleshoot the problem for several hours already with no luck (been googling too and read the django doc about serving static files as well).

The error as I tried to access localhost:8000/media/a.gif is as following:

Page not found: f:\python25\lib\site-packages\django/contrib/admin/media\a.gif

I put the admin media files in directory named "media", while I put the normal media files in directory named "static". I'm on Windows, too.

Here's how I serve the ordinary media files in urls.py:

# serve static files
from django.conf import settings
if settings.ENVIRONMENT==settings.ENV_DEVELOPMENT:
    urlpatterns += patterns("django.views",
        url(r"%s(?P<path>.*)$" % settings.MEDIA_URL[1:], "static.serve", {"document_root": settings.MEDIA_ROOT,})
    )

And my settings.py (only the important pieces):

import project_path
MEDIA_ROOT = project_path.MEDIA.replace('\\','/')
MEDIA_URL = '/static/'
ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX = '/media/'
TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
    project_path.TEMPLATE.replace('\\','/'),
)

And my project_path.py:

import sys
from os.path import dirname, join
ROOT = dirname(__file__)
APP = join(ROOT, "apps")
TEMPLATE = join(ROOT, "templates")
MEDIA = join(ROOT, "static")
ADMIN_MEDIA = join(ROOT, "media")

Any hints?

or maybe at least please share how do you serve your admin media files (without changing any files from the web server, but only via the django source code)

Thanks in advance :)

Answer 1

Your answer is that unless ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX explicitly sets a domain the runserver command will serve out the admin media files from contrib.admin.

I got burned by this magic behaviour, too. There was a ticket for this (Ticket #8336), but the design decision was to leave the convenience and confusion as it is.

So to serve your admin media (for using grappelli or whatever admin skin you want to use) from your directories with the runserver command you have to use something like:

MEDIA_ROOT =  os.path.join(PROJECT_ROOT, 'media/')
ADMIN_MEDIA_ROOT = os.path.join(PROJECT_ROOT, 'admin-media/')
MEDIA_URL = '/site-media/'
ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX = 'http:/localhost:8000/admin-media/'

I hope I am resurrecting the correct question here. Apologies in advance.

Answer 2

It is advised to run the dev server a little bit different [1] python manage.py runserver mydomain.com:8000 --adminmedia=/path/to/your/admin/media/

[1] http://code.google.com/p/django-grappelli/wiki/Installation