What is the difference between {% load staticfiles %} and {% load static %}

Question

The most important part of the question is in the topic.

I am wondering what tag is best for which case. Moreover... I found code, that also use settings.STATIC_URL included by {{STATIC_URL}} in the templates.

I am a little confused.

Answer 1

The built-in static template tag "link[s] to static files that are saved in STATIC_ROOT".

The staticfiles contrib app's static template tag "uses the configured STATICFILES_STORAGE storage to create the full URL for the given relative path", which is "especially useful when using a non-local storage backend to deploy files".

The built-in static template tag's documentation (linked to above) has a note that says to use the staticfiles contrib app's static template tag "if you have an advanced use case such as using a cloud service to serve static files", and it gives this example of doing so:

{% load static from staticfiles %} <img src="{% static "images/hi.jpg" %}" alt="Hi!" /> 

You could use {% load staticfiles %} rather than {% load static from staticfiles %} if you want, but the latter is more explicit.

Answer 2

I don't know what the difference is supposed to be, but I found a use case difference (using django 1.9.1 running via apache, wsgi on Python 3.4). In my app, I have some images in ImageFields in the database. If I use code like this in my template:

<a href="object-{{object.id}}"><img src="{% static object.image %}" height="200px"></a> 

then, if I use {% load static %}, django throws a TypeError (Cannot mix str and non-str arguments). This is presumably because the object.image is not a string, it's an ImageField, that gets converted to a string at some later stage. However, if one uses {% load staticfiles %} no such error occurs.

Unfortunately, I discovered this difference after spending hours trying to debug the problem. I managed to find a workaround for when using the first option, namely to add a string-converter method to the object like this:

#image string def image_str(self):     return str(self.image) 

Hope this knowledge will be of use to someone.