Serve static files for production with WhiteNoise in Django

Django relies on the staticfiles app to serve static files for local development.

For production, we run collectstatic command to compile all static files into a single directory specified by STATIC_ROOT, see [[Collect static files for production serving in Django]]. The files can then be served by the same django server with the aid of Whitenoise .

Install WhiteNoise

pip install whitenoise

Make sure staticfiles is configured correctly

see [[Collect static files for production serving in Django]]

Enable WhiteNoise

Add the WhiteNoise middleware after SecurityMiddleware and before all other middlewares:

MIDDLEWARE = [
    # ...
    "django.middleware.security.SecurityMiddleware",
    "whitenoise.middleware.WhiteNoiseMiddleware",
    # ...
]

Add compression and caching support

WhiteNoise comes with a storage backend which compresses your files and hashes them to unique names, so they can safely be cached forever. To use it, set it as your staticfiles storage backend in your settings file.

On Django 4.2+:

STORAGES = {
    # ...
    "staticfiles": {
        "BACKEND": "whitenoise.storage.CompressedManifestStaticFilesStorage",
    },
}

On older Django versions:

STATICFILES_STORAGE = "whitenoise.storage.CompressedManifestStaticFilesStorage"

Using WhiteNoise in development

In development Django’s runserver automatically takes over static file handling.

We can disable Django’s static file handling and allow WhiteNoise to take over simply by passing the --nostatic option to the runserver command. Another way is to edit settings.py file and add whitenoise.runserver_nostatic to the top of django.contrib.staticfiles:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    # ...
    "whitenoise.runserver_nostatic",
    "django.contrib.staticfiles",
    # ...
]