Handling static files

At one point or another you want to add assets like CSS files, JavaScript files or images to your project.

The adviced solution is to store the files externally (like an AWS S3 bucket). For prototypes or smaller projects it is easier to let Django serve the static files on production as well. While Django handles static files locally just fine, the Heroku app needs a bit of configuration.

Add `django-heroku`

With django-heroku Heroku provides a handy Python package that helps dealing with configuration settings for Heroku. Especially the handling of settings, static files and logging is much easier with it.

PIP grabs all required dependencies when installing django-heroku. This includes:

dj-database-url`
whitenoise
psycopg2
django (We already have this one! 😉)

Install django-heroku:

Terminal

pip install django-heroku

Add it to our settings.py file:

djangoku/settings.py (At the bottom of the file)

import django_heroku
django_heroku.settings(locals())

Update our requirements

Now that we have two new modules in our project, let’s update our requirements.

Update requirements.txt:

Terminal

pip freeze > requirements.txt

Commit the code

If you run git status you will see, that we updated requirements.txt and settings.py.

Now we can stage and commit our changes:

Terminal

git add .
git commit -m "Configure static files handling 📂"

Handling static files