Make STATIC_URL context variable aware of backing storage with staticfiles

[Daniel R]

I've always used the STATIC_URL context processor variable in templates and didn't have trouble with it up until a few days ago when a customer required to use the STATICFILES_STORAGE.

I then realized I would need to change all the {{STATIC_URL}} template references to use a {% static %} tag via {% load static from staticfiles %}, which just seemed overwhelming, so I just tweaked django.template.context_processors.static to make it staticfiles aware.  

Given the prevelance of templates that use {{STATIC_URL}} and now the possibility of changing storage, I thought I'd suggest this as a possible new fix/feature. Here's another post which addreses the same problem http://staticfiles.productiondjango.com/blog/stop-using-static-url-in-templates/ but simply says to use {% load static from staticfiles %} and never use {{STATIC_URL}}. But given the wide use of {{STATIC_URL}} this may be an easy and worthwhile fix instead of asking users to change template references.

What do you think ? 

Current django.template.context_processors.static is pretty basic:

def static(request):
    """
    Adds static-related context variables to the context.
    """
    return {'STATIC_URL': settings.STATIC_URL}

It would change to something like 

def static(request):
    """
    Adds static-related context variables to the context.
    """
    if 'django.contrib.staticfiles' in settings.INSTALLED_APPS:
       from django.contrib.staticfiles.storage import staticfiles_storage
       return {'STATIC_URL':staticfiles_storage.url }
    else:
       return {'STATIC_URL': settings.STATIC_URL}

[Florian Apolloner]

On Saturday, March 19, 2016 at 7:01:28 PM UTC+1, Daniel R wrote:

But given the wide use of {{STATIC_URL}} this may be an easy and worthwhile fix instead of asking users to change template references.

Wide? Not sure what your definition of wide is, but I suspect that the tag has way higher usage, especially since it is the only way if you want to work it with the storage backends.
 

What do you think ? 

Nothing, cause it is not as simple as you suggest, storage backends in general also change the name of the file to include a hash of the contents etc… Your only sensible option is to switch to the tag. Fwiw, writing a simple script which performs replacement in every template should be simple enough…

Cheers,
Florian