Does django staticfiles skip the middleware?

Question

I\'m running a django 1.4.1 app.

I didn\'t realize that just including django.contrib.staticfiles into INSTALLED_APPS in your settings is e

Answer 1

I just figured this out after posting…

If you're using django-admin.py runserver or python manage.py runserver, then it does some extra magic to add a staticfiles handler that your regular middleware can't touch.

You can disable this by running django-admin.py runserver --nostatic — see the django docs

And when you do --nostatic it will fall back to the urls in your app, such as if you include staticfiles_urls() directly with:

urlpatterns += staticfiles_urlpatterns()

then your middleware will run for those urls (and of course all your others).