Media files not displaying when DEBUG = False; what are the prerequisites to get them to show?

Question

As I state in the title, when I set DEBUG = False in my project's settings file, the files from my media directory (the one the user uploads) don't display. The files from my static directory (the CSS and JavaScript files) load properly.

I looked at this answer, but I don't understand the prerequisites to get this to work. I am testing this on my local machine, where I only have Django and PostgreSQL installed. I don't have any Apache servers running, as far as I'm aware. I want to deploy my app on Amazon AWS, so I'd like to try out how it will look in production there before I deploy it to Amazon AWS.

Here are the relevant parts of my settings.py file:

DEBUG = False
ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['*']
STATIC_URL = '/static/'
MEDIA_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR,'media')
MEDIA_URL = '/media/'
STATICFILES_DIRS = [
   BASE_DIR / "static",
   '/var/www/static/',
]

@WillemVanOnsem OK. I have two questions on this: 1) How is it then that my static files load properly? 2) What do I need to do in order to show my media files in production? — Eternal_Ether, Dec 13 '20 at 08:43
1) caching? 2) set up the web server like apache/nginx to serve files. — Willem Van Onsem, Dec 13 '20 at 10:43

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 12 '22 at 07:46

Willem Van Onsem is right on the media files. Since the static file is OK, for the workaround, you can add this line to your urls.py in the folder containing settings.py:

from django.conf.urls.static import static
from django.conf import settings

urlpatterns+=static(settings.MEDIA_URL, document_root=settings.MEDIA_ROOT)

Media files not displaying when DEBUG = False; what are the prerequisites to get them to show?

1 Answers1