Django's admin pages are missing their typical formatting/style, have I set it up wrong?

Question

I finally got my django install working, however I'm noticing that the typical look and feel of the admin pages are missing, and it's as if there are no styles applied to the structure of the pages. Do I have some kind of setup issue or pathing issue that's preventing the style sheets from being found? Where are they stored? My pages look like they are from 1994.

Answer 1

I've solved this issue simply with the alias on apache:

    Alias /static/admin/ /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/django/contrib/admin/media/
    Alias admin/media/ /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/django/contrib/admin/media/

Answer 2

Sounds like your admin media isn't being served correctly. In your settings.py, there's a variable called ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX, which specifies the URL where Django should look for them. The actual media files are in "[path to your Python site-packages]/django/contrib/admin/media". When using manage.py runserver, the files are served "automagically". However, when using Apache/nginx/etc it's your responsibility to make sure that your server makes the files available at that URL (using rewrite rules, symlinks, etc). More info can be found here.