Django Admin CSS missing

I've been messing around with the new collectstatic command and have got it working for my normal pages. That is to say, I am able to load my css at this location http://localhost:8000/static/css/main.css. However, the css for my django admin doesn't seem to be showing up.

When I navigate to the admin css location at http://localhost:8000/static/admin/css/base.css, I'm getting a 404 page not found with the following error: /home/nai/GitProjects/cats/django-trunk/django/contrib/admin/media/css/base.css" does not exist. Looking in django-trunk, I never had the /home/nai/GitProjects/cats/django-trunk/django/contrib/admin/media/ folder to begin with.

Is that weird?

In any case, in my static folder, there is an admin folder with the accompanying css, img and js folders which was created when I ran collectstatic and the url of the base.css seems to be pointing to that location.

This is happening on my django development server. Here are some snippets to aid in the bug hunt:

urls

 33 # In order for Dev Server to serve media files for the frontend site.
 34 urlpatterns += staticfiles_urlpatterns()
 35 
 36 try:
 37     if settings.DEBUG: # defined in manage.py when the first arg is "runserver"
 38         urlpatterns += patterns('',
 39         (r'^media/(?P<path>.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve',{'document_root': settings.MEDIA_ROOT}),
 40         (r'^media-admin/(?P<path>.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve',{'document_root': os.path.join(settings.MEDIA_ROOT, '..', settings.ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX)}),
 41         )
 42 except NameError:
 43     pass

I think it might be something to do with line 40 in my URLS file but changing media-admin to static/admin didnt help.

settings

     58 ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX = '/static/admin'
     69 STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(os.path.abspath(os.path.join(PROJECT_ROOT, '..', MEDIA_DIR, 'static')), '')
     70 
     71 # URL prefix for static files.
     72 # Example: "http://media.lawrence.com/static/"
         73 STATIC_URL = '/static/'
     74 
     75 # Additional locations of static files. Global files are stored in here
     76 STATICFILES_DIRS = (
     77     os.path.join(os.path.abspath(os.path.join(PROJECT_ROOT, '..', 'proj_public', 'static', 'proj')), ''),
     78     )
     79

Solution

Django recommends that you deploy static files with a web server other than wsgi.

In settings.py, set:

STATIC_ROOT = 'static'

Run python manage.py collectstatic, which will copy the Django admin static files to /path/to/project/static/

Configure your static file server. If you use Nginx, you could add this config:

location /static/ {                              
    alias /path/to/project/static/;  
    expires modified +1w;                        
}

Reload your web server

You should now have access to the static files.