This is by design: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/static-files/#serving-static-files-during-development
If you use django.contrib.staticfiles as explained above, runserver will do this automatically when DEBUG is set to True.
That being said, you can use the following workaround by modifying your urls.py
:
from django.conf import settings
from django.conf.urls.static import static
urlpatterns = patterns('',
# ... the rest of your URLconf goes here ...
) + static(settings.STATIC_URL, document_root=settings.STATIC_ROOT)
+ static(settings.MEDIA_URL, document_root=settings.MEDIA_ROOT)
Note that this is highly inefficient and not encouraged for production use. You should normally configure your web server (apache, nginx, etc) to serve your static and media content.