Serve Static Files through IIS

Generally websites have static files such as CSS, JS, Images served to clients beside the primary responses. Those files are considered as “Static Files” because they can be delivered without being generated, modified or processed.

In Django, static files can be served by the Django Framework itself. This is very convenient during Development, but is not suitable for Production use.

See also

About Serving Static Files: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/howto/static-files/

For production use, it is advised to let the Web Server to serve the Static Files. This is how it can be done:

Note

This how-to describes serving both Static Files and Media Files. In case you don’t need or use one of those features, you can just ignore the respective parts in the tutorial.

First you will need to configure the following settings:

STATIC_URL = '/static/'
STATIC_ROOT = BASE_DIR / "static"

MEDIA_URL = '/media/'
MEDIA_ROOT = BASE_DIR / "media"

The STATIC_URL represents the file path over HTTP, while the STATIC_ROOT directs to the Physical path of the files in the Web Server’s OS. Meanwhile from the IIS point of view, the HTTPS path is derived from the file’s Physical path location. Although this can be altered using Virtual Directories, it is usually advised not to.

The same applies for the MEDIA_URL and MEDIA_ROOT settings.

Next we will need to create web.config files in each folder to configure IIS to server Static Files.

Note

Any time the STATIC_ROOT setting is changes, you will need to start over from this step.

This can be done by running the createwebconfig management command::

$ py manage.py createwebconfig -s -m

The -s switch is used configure the STATIC_ROOT folder, while -m switch is used to configure the MEDIA_ROOT folder.

Now all we need to do is to collect all the static files from the many Django apps into the STATIC_ROOT folder. This can be done by running the collectstatic management command::

$ py manage.py collectstatic