Struggling with django hierarchy - not serving admin css

Question

I'm trying to work through the django tutorial but have gotten hung up on displaying the css associated with the admin module. I'm working on windows, with django 1.6, apache and MySQL

My current hierarchy is as follows:

MySite
|
|---static
|   |--admin
|      |--css
|      |--img
|      |--js  
|---MyApp
|   |--__init__.py
|   |--admin.py
|   |--models.py
|   |--tests.py
|   |--views.py
|---MySite
|   |--__init.py
|   |--settings.py
|   |--testdb.py
|   |--urls.py
|   |--wsgi.py
|--manage.py

within the settings.py file I've defined the STATIC_URL as

STATIC_URL = '/MySite/static/'

When I inspect the resulting admin page it shows that it is looking for the css at MySite/static/admin/css, which is where it is, but its not finding it there. It seems the root isn't correct.

In my urls.py I've got

admin.autodiscover()

urlpatterns = patterns('',  
    url(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
)

---

EDIT:

My Apache htttpd.conf file is completely untouched from what XAMPP originally installed, except I've included *LoadModule wsgi_module modules/mod_wsgi.so* at the appropriate spot, and appended

WSGIScriptAlias /MySite F:/Web_Django/MySite/MySite/wsgi.py
WSGIPythonPath F:/Web_Django/MySite
<Directory F:/Web_Django/MySite/MySite/>
<Files wsgi.py>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Files>
</Directory>

I've included the entire file at http://pastebin.com/AD77f69c

---

EDIT2:

I've discovered that when using apache you need to implement the wsgi.py file slightly differently. I now have the following, but the problem remains.

import os
import sys

path = 'f:/web_django/Nutana/'
if path not in sys.path:
    sys.path.append(path)

os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'Nutana.settings'

import django.core.handlers.wsgi
application = django.core.handlers.wsgi.WSGIHandler()

Graham Dumpleton, the developer of the modwsgi adaptor for apache, provides an alternate wsgi file which he (and many others, apparently) feels works better in an old blog post (http://tinyurl.com/y8wr7gc), but it doesn't work for me.

Answer 1

EDIT

It is, of course better to have the customization for the project within the project itself, locally at least. This anticipates the use of collectstatic to prepare for moving the site off of my development machine. Following @LGama's advice I've moved it into the project and updated the alias as shown below.

---

@DanielRoseman commented that I "have to actually configure Apache to serve the static files", which of course I thought I was doing! By going back through the apache error log files, and consulting this similar question (Apache not serving django admin static files) I've sussed it out. There needs to be a 'static' alias created in httpd.conf. I've also moved the wsgi.py script into its own folder upon the advice of Graham Dumpleton. So now my structure is

f:\django_web/
   |---MySite
       |---static/
       |   |---admin/
       |       |--css
       |       |--img
       |       |--js  
       |---MyApp/
       |   |--__init__.py
       |   |--admin.py
       |   |--models.py
       |   |--tests.py
       |   |--views.py
       |---MySite/
       |   |--__init.py
       |   |--settings.py
       |   |--testdb.py
       |   |--urls.py
       |---Apache/
       |   |--wsgi.py
       |--manage.py

and my httpd configuration includes:

Alias /static "F:/Web_Django/MySite/static/"
<Directory "F:/Web_Django/MySite/static/">
    Order allow,deny
    Options Indexes
    Allow from all
    IndexOptions FancyIndexing
</Directory>

WSGIScriptAlias /MySite F:/Web_Django/MySite/Apache/wsgi.py
WSGIPythonPath F:/Web_Django/MySite
<Directory F:/Web_Django/MySite/Apache/>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Directory>

and everything works!

Answer 2

Just to clarify your answer: you can keep your files inside the project (for development purposes) and when you need deploy you utilize the command

django-admin.py collectstatic¶

to collect your files in the directory described in settings.py > STATIC_ROOT

One of the vantages is that you can use your JS and CSS normally and when its time to deploy you can use an extension like compression (http://django-compressor.readthedocs.org/en/latest/) to minify and send the minified to the static root (that can be in a CDN).

Further reading: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/staticfiles/

EDIT

In Nginx you would use

location /myuser/static/ {                                         # STATIC_URL
    alias /home/myuser/projects/src/MyProject/static/;              # STATIC_ROOT
}

to define an alias to the STATIC_ROOT.

The server would then know where to look for those files created with Collect_static.

What I believe happens with you is that your server doesn't know where to find your files inside the project. Other problem with using files served inside the project is that you lose modularity. you cant have different static directories (one for each module) inside your project without having to create more aliases in your server (more clutter).

That doesnt happen with the dev server by the way. it finds your files without need to configuration.