Handling static files that dont pertain to an app in Django

Question

In the documentation https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/static-files/

I read that static files should be put with their respective apps and called upon with

Answer 1

Almost everything about django static is related to the django.contrib.staticfiles app. Although you need to custom edit many settings to make staticfiles work, what is does is simple. It provides a collectstatic command which collects static files from different app and put them into a single directory.

The answer to your first question is simple: Put those common static files under the /static directory of your django project directory. In your case, it's mysite/static.

Reason: First, it's the official way. You can find the following code in official doc: Managing static files (CSS, images). Second, it's reasonable. Since we put static files only used in a single app under project/appnane/static/... The project's static dir should follow the same name pattern.

STATICFILES_DIRS = (
    os.path.join(BASE_DIR, "static"), # That's it!!
    '/var/www/static/',
)

As I said in the comment, your should not set STATIC_ROOT to project_absolutr_path/static. Because that directory is user to put css app static files. You don't want the collectstatics command to pollute that directory especially when you are using a version control system like git/svn.

STATIC_ROOT really depends on the way you host these static files(Apache, Nginx, S3, CDN, Paas like heroku)