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I am trying to debug this bizarre 404 error that surfaced in my Django application.

Page not found (404)
Request Method: GET
Request URL:    http://78.198.124.245/
Directory indexes are not allowed here.
You're seeing this error because you have DEBUG = True in your Django settings file. Change that to False, and Django will display a standard 404 page.

What does "Directory indexes are not allowed here." mean? What is a directory index?

I Googled around, and the results I found all have to do with serving static files. However, I don't think I do that. What does this error mean?

dangerChihuahua007
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    Was your website previously working and then this started happening after some change? This seems to imply that there is no url mapping being done and your web server is falling back on the default behavior of trying to display a directory listing for the root folder ./ on your website. Maybe checking this question will help http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5170080/django-always-gives-404 – nvuono May 17 '12 at 23:32
  • Thanks, this seems something to explore - though I have been tinkering with URL configurations to no avail. The site used to work on a different server. It stopped working after I moved the files to a new server. – dangerChihuahua007 May 18 '12 at 02:29

4 Answers4

11

Check your settings.py file for the STATIC_URL value. You want the value to be the subfolder where your static files are stored - generally STATIC_URL = '/static/'.

Dan Hoerst
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3

The answer depends on which django version you are using. For 1.4+ then just set the STATIC_URL

For 1.3.x its not so much what the STATIC_URL is set to as what your ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX is set to.

If you set it to /admin/ then django development server will attempt to serve static files for everything under /admin/ out of the contrib/admin/media/ folder

This means that http://127.0.0.0:8000/admin/postz/post/473 will attempt to find static content at django/contrib/admin/media/postz/post/473 and that's what the 404 is

If you are trying to access http://127.0.0.0:8000/admin/ then that would be an index.html inside of the admin media directory but the internal static server does not allow indexes so that's the error that it throws.

The accepted answer isn't exactly correct. Setting STATIC_URL may have worked as a side effect, but the real issue was that ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX was wrong.

The best settings would be:

ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX = '/media/'

or

ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX = '/admin/media/'

For 1.4 then just set the STATIC_URL as ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX is deprecated

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.4/#django-contrib-admin

Chris Sattinger
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I had the same problem sometime ago and I also was looking for an answer but couldn't find anything useful. However, the problem for me was the the name I entered in the path in the urls file in my app didn't match the name of the function in views.

 path('home-en', views.home_en, name="home")

Here 'home-en' should've been 'home_en' to match the name of the view function.

Alaa Radhwan Mustafa Shamsan
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The reason for getting this error is that maybe trying to map our view with a custom url which luckily is a directory name. so in this case, for e.g: we're storing our all static files in Static named folder and we're trying to create a url : path('static/',views.static_view). So in this case it will not work. what we can do, we can change the custom url to any generic url such as 'inex/' and it will work.

jai
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