STATICFILES et la balise static

Your CSS, JavaScript, and design images do not change per request. Django calls these static files and serves them separately from your Python views. 🎨

Django ships django.contrib.staticfiles in INSTALLED_APPS by default. It finds, collects, and serves your assets so you do not wire that up by hand.

By convention you keep an app's assets inside a folder named static right next to its views and templates. Django scans every app for that folder.

Nest assets under a folder matching the app name, like static/blog/. This namespacing stops two apps from clobbering each other's style.css.

The STATIC_URL setting is the public path prefix browsers use to fetch assets. Requests starting with this prefix are routed to your static files.

To reference assets in a template, first load the tag library with load static at the very top of the file.

The static tag turns a relative asset path into the correct full URL, so you never hardcode STATIC_URL into your HTML.

If you wrote /static/blog/style.css by hand, changing STATIC_URL later would break every page. The static tag keeps your links flexible. ✅

The same static tag works for any asset type. Point a script tag at a JS file and Django resolves the path for you.

For project-wide assets that belong to no single app, add their folders to STATICFILES_DIRS and Django will search there too.

Behind the scenes, static finders walk every app's static folder plus STATICFILES_DIRS to locate the file a template asks for.

You learned that static files are your CSS and JS, that they live in namespaced static folders, and that the static tag builds their URLs cleanly. 🎉