Book Image

Web Development with Django

By : Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Andrew Bird, Bharath Chandra K S, Chris Guest
Book Image

Web Development with Django

By: Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Andrew Bird, Bharath Chandra K S, Chris Guest

Overview of this book

Do you want to develop reliable and secure applications which stand out from the crowd, rather than spending hours on boilerplate code? Then the Django framework is where you should begin. Often referred to as a 'batteries included' web development framework, Django comes with all the core features needed to build a standalone application. Web Development with Django takes this philosophy and equips you with the knowledge and confidence to build real-world applications using Python. Starting with the essential concepts of Django, you'll cover its major features by building a website called Bookr – a repository for book reviews. This end-to-end case study is split into a series of bitesize projects that are presented as exercises and activities, allowing you to challenge yourself in an enjoyable and attainable way. As you progress, you'll learn various practical skills, including how to serve static files to add CSS, JavaScript, and images to your application, how to implement forms to accept user input, and how to manage sessions to ensure a reliable user experience. Throughout this book, you'll cover key daily tasks that are part of the development cycle of a real-world web application. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills and confidence to creatively tackle your own ambitious projects with Django.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Preface

Settings for Media Uploads and Serving

In Chapter 5, Serving Static Files, we looked at how Django can be used to serve static files. Serving media files is quite similar. Two settings must be configured in settings.py: MEDIA_ROOT and MEDIA_URL. These are analogous to STATIC_ROOT and STATIC_URL for serving static files.

  • MEDIA_ROOT

    This is the path on the disk where the media (such as uploaded files) will be stored. As with static files, your web server should be configured to serve directly from this directory, to take the load off Django.

  • MEDIA_URL

    This is similar to STATIC_URL, but as you might guess, it's the URL that should be used to serve media. It must end in a /. Generally, you will use something like /media/.

    Note

    For security reasons, the path for MEDIA_ROOT must not be the same as the path for STATIC_ROOT, and MEDIA_URL must not be the same as STATIC_URL. If they were the same, a user might replace your static files (such as JavaScript or CSS files) with malicious...