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Add some app-specific static content to your site. This is CSS or other static files that are only needed by one particular app, not the whole project. Understand how to include app-specific content in your project, and why you might want to do so.
Managing Static Files: The Django documentation goes into more detail about how Django serves static content in different environments. If you'd like more detail than what we've gone into here, I recommend checking out the docs. Always read the docs!
You can also use template tags to
get at other data in your project,
0:00
including your static files like your CSS.
0:05
In Django, you need to store your
static files in a special way.
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It's best to store your project-wide
static files in a directory called assets.
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In our case, the setup looks like this.
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To add CSS that's specific
to an app however,
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you need to follow a slightly
different pattern.
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If we wanted to add CSS
to our courses app,
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we'd need to add a directory called
static underneath our courses app.
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That directory contains its own
directory also called courses.
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Static slash courses then contains
directories for your CSS,
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your JavaScript files, and
any images you're using in your app.
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This is so the Django can always
find the files you're referring to.
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Adding a directory with the same name
as your app inside your static folder
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feels a little weird, but it helps you
avoid namespace collisions later on.
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For example, if your project
had an app called admin, and
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another called main site, and
both of those apps had static
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files associated with them,
they might have files with the same names.
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Styles.css is a really common
way to name a basic CSS file.
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When Django tries to find
styles.css in the static folder for
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your admin app, if you have the extra
directory with the name of your app,
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then Django goes to the CSS
directory in static/admin,
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and that extra admin helps Django
know it's in the right place.
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This is called namespacing.
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So let's try it out.
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Make sure to reload your workspace,
1:52
because the new workspace
has some new CSS files.
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We added some CSS to our courses app.
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Let's walk through how that's
set up before we get started.
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First, we created a new directory
in the course's app called static.
2:04
Next, we created a directory
within the static directory
2:10
with the same name as our app, courses.
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Finally, we created a directory called
CSS inside the course's directory.
2:17
This is where we store the CSS
file that is specific to this app.
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Now, we just need to add this new CSS to
our templates, but we have a problem,.
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This is app specific CSS, so
we should not add it to layout.html.
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We don't want this CSS to be used
on other pages in this project
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that aren't in the course's app.
2:43
So, we should add a new
block tag to layout.html.
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So we'll add that here,
right below the existing style sheet.
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We just open up a new block tag,
call it static, and immediately close it.
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We add the static block after
the original style sheet
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because we don't want to have to add
the project wide CSS to each template.
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The static tag is for
app specific CSS in other templates.
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Now, let's open up course
list.html in the course's app and
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add our app specific CSS to this file.
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So first, right here above the block
title, we will add our block static tag.
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And I like to immediately close it, so
I don't have to remember to do that later.
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And we can also save ourselves a little
bit of typing by copying the link
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to the existing style sheet and
pasting it here.
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We just have to remember
to change this path.
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Now here, we're going to be a little more
specific about the path to the CSS file.
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So we'll say courses/css/courses.css.
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This is so Django will definitely know
where to look to find this particular
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CSS file.
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We also need to add the load
tag to the top of this page.
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So, load static from static files.
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This lets Django know that we intend
to load some new static content.
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Now, we just need to start our server.
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So we will change directories
into learning site and
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then use python manage.py
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ruserver on our port to
take a look at our site.
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So here we can see that the titles
of the courses are navy blue,
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instead of the maroon color
that you see in the header.
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This is because this particular
page is using our app-specific CSS.
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If we open the CSS file,
we see that the CSS that we changed
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is the color of these headers,
which is now navy blue.
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So that's the static tag in a nutshell.
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In the next video, we'll get into
some useful built-in filters, and
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start building our own
custom template filters.
5:08
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