What to set MEDIA_ROOT and MEDIA_URL to when deploying django app on Heroku

Question

I have deployed an app on Heroku using their free account.

I have my js and css files inside a folder called 'media'. It looks like these are normally placed in 'static', but the project I was building on top of already had them in media so I just went with it.

So I have:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="{{ MEDIA_URL }}css/style.css" />

And in my settings.py file, I have:

abspath = lambda *p: os.path.abspath(os.path.join(*p))

PROJECT_ROOT = abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__))

MEDIA_ROOT = abspath(PROJECT_ROOT, 'media')
MEDIA_URL = '/media/'

After I deployed my app I set:

DEBUG = False

And now my templates are rendering without CSS. I searched around and it looks like an issue with MEDIA_ROOT and MEDIA_URL. Most of the stuff I'm finding is about getting static files to work in production, or about getting media files to work in development. This looks like getting media files to work in production.

What exactly should I be setting MEDIA_ROOT and MEDIA_URL to?

EDIT: I should point out I won't be uploading anything to the 'media' folder.

Chris Pratt · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-14 21:43:03Z

12

MEDIA_URL and MEDIA_ROOT together dictate where uploads go, i.e. anything added to FileFields or ImageFields on your models.

STATIC_URL and STATIC_ROOT together dictate the location that static resources will be dumped by the collectstatic management command and subsequently what URL prefix will be used to fetch them. You don't actually ever manually put anything in STATIC_ROOT.

If you won't be using media for uploads, you should change its name to something else. I tend to use "assets" for my general project-level static resources, but the name doesn't matter ("media" is used for MEDIA_ROOT 99 times out of 100, so it's merely confusing). Whatever you use, add the full directory path to STATICFILES_DIRS.

Then, in production you run python manage.py collectstatic. All the files in each app's "static" directory as well as each directory in STATICFILES_DIRS will be dumped into STATIC_ROOT. You then setup your webserver (Apache, nginx, etc) to serve STATIC_ROOT at STATIC_URL.

In Django 1.3, you need to specify ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX as well to get the admin to work:

ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX = STATIC_URL + 'admin/'

In Django 1.4, this will no longer be necessary.

answered Mar 14, 2012 at 21:43

Chris Pratt

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1 Comment

Nicola Amadio Over a year ago

what if you actually want to use media files in your session? And the media files can be deleted after the session is finished, making it an overkill (?) to use AWS s3

Fernando · Accepted Answer · 2019-06-12 05:18:25Z

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Amazon S3 seems to be first-thing-to-try on many blogs: http://caseycesari.github.io/2012/01/02/s3-heroku-django.html

I did managed to serve static files from heroku, however it was nightmare :|

So unless you can put them in DB just try out if you can put your static files on some free storage.

edited Jun 12, 2019 at 5:18

Fernando

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answered Mar 14, 2012 at 22:42

przemo_li

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4 Comments

SecondMatter Over a year ago

I did put all the static files on S3 and got it to work. Do you know if you're supposed to put the all the admin media files there as well? That is what I ended up doing, but it seems like there's a better way for that...

przemo_li Over a year ago

admin files? no they worked out of the box on heroku. First thing after creating project I did enabled admin site, and it worked!

przemo_li Over a year ago

However S3 may be faster than heroku. So its not bad either. (And some claim that hosting SQL on independent provider can boost your request per minute max limit by factor of 8! So if this set up work for you, do not change it.)

Brandon Clapp Over a year ago

The link seems to be broken.

markshiz · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-21 02:56:46Z

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You can add the following to your settings.py

import os.path
root = os.path.dirname(__file__).replace('\\','/')

Then use the root variable to calculate a path relative to your django install, wherever it is. This all assumes your combined slug size is under the Heroku maximum.

answered Dec 21, 2012 at 2:56

markshiz

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