How to reference static file in Django app's view

Question

I know there have been many questions here on accessing static files in a Django project, but I could not find a satisfactory answer to a problem I am dealing with. So, here's my project structure:

.
├── project
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── settings.py
│   ├── urls.py
│   ├── wsgi.py
├── db.sqlite3
├── manage.py
└── app
    ├── admin.py
    ├── __init__.py
    ├── migrations
    │   ├── __init__.py
    ├── models.py
    ├── static
    │   └── app
    │       └── file.txt
    ├── tests.py
    ├── urls.py
    └── views.py

As per Django 1.7 documentation I have stored the static file file.txt in app/static/app folder. Now, how do I reference this file in a view? Lets just say I need to read the contents of this file for every call defined in app/views.py.

As usual, I have default setting of STATIC_URL = '/static/' in project/settings.py

Thanks

Joseph · Answer 1 · 2015-03-25T23:16:11.960

8

You can import the static template tag into your view and use it as such:

from django.templatetags.static import static

url = static('app/file.jpg')

edited Mar 25 '15 at 23:16

answered Mar 25 '15 at 23:14

Joseph

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I need to access the static file in a view, not in a template tag. Above can't work in a view. – abhinavkulkarni Mar 25 '15 at 23:15
Is there a way of not hardcoding the name of the app? – abhinavkulkarni Mar 25 '15 at 23:19
You will have have to hardcode the name of the app, as it defines the directory it is stored in. – Siddharth Gupta Mar 25 '15 at 23:20
@SiddharthGupta: Is there not a way to get the app's name inside its view? – abhinavkulkarni Mar 25 '15 at 23:23
@abhinavkulkarni You could probably do something fancy with `inspect` (see [this answer](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/247770/retrieving-python-module-path/12154601#12154601)), but IMO you're better off defining it explicitly. You could use a global in your module to define the app name and juse use that wherever you call `static`. Or, you could define a wrapper around `static`. – Joseph Mar 25 '15 at 23:24
@SiddharthGupta: I get {'appname': None} as a result of call to that method. – abhinavkulkarni Mar 25 '15 at 23:29
@abhinavkulkarni Have a look at my answer and I think that will help. – Siddharth Gupta Mar 25 '15 at 23:29

Siddharth Gupta · Answer 2 · 2015-03-25T23:34:58.617

You can do this by defining STATIC_ROOT in your settings. Then before running your project you can run

python manage.py collectstatic

And the static files then can be accessed using:-

file = open(os.path.join(settings.STATIC_ROOT, 'app/a.txt'))

This is basically the way, it is supposed to be done in a production environment, as static files are hosted separately from the django html views.

To load the name of app dynamically in project/urls.py

url(r'^', include('app.urls', app_name="app")),

and then in views:-

from django.core.urlresolvers import resolve
def appname(request):
    return resolve(request.path).app_name

How to reference static file in Django app's view

2 Answers2