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.

Answer 3

Django documentation prefers now {% load static %}.

{% load staticfiles %} works but I think it is deprecated.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/builtins/#static

Answer 4

Refer to the docs, where there is a nice explanation of it. Actually the {% static %} template tag know the location of STATICFILE_STORAGE

As docs say :

 {% load static from staticfiles %} <img src="{% static "images/hi.jpg"
 %}" alt="Hi!" /> The previous example is equal to calling the url method of an instance of STATICFILES_STORAGE with "images/hi.jpg".

This is especially useful when using a non-local storage backend to deploy files as documented in Serving static files from a cloud service or CDN.

If you’d like to retrieve a static URL without displaying it, you can use a slightly different call:

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

Hope that helps!!

Answer 5

{% load staticfiles %} is very helpful when you are using different storages like S3, then it will convert into the S3 URLs