How to refer to static files in my css files?

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5898776

  •  29-10-2019
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Question

I have a reference inside my CSS file that refers to a static image: 

#logo
{
  background: url('/static/logo.png')
}

This works just fine on my dev machine but not on my production environment since the url should be static.mydomain.com/logo.png. How do I dynamically change the css file according to the STATIC_URL in my settings file?

Was it helpful?

Solution

Use a relative path. Relative to the folder where the css file reside

OTHER TIPS

You can move any CSS that contains static file paths to inline CSS, contained in the template.

i.e.

<div style="background: url('{% static 'logo.png' %}')"></div>

The catch here is that it won't work for @media queries, you'd need to put those in a block, e.g.

<style>
    @media (min-width: 1200px){
       background: url('{% static 'logo.png' %}');
    }
</style>

See this similar stackoverflow question.

The only way to do what you want is to generate your CSS through Django. HTML is usually associated with Django views and templates, but in truth, you can return any file type: CSS, JavaScript, plain text, etc. However, doing so will add overhead to your site, so setting proper HTTP headers and server-side caching of the generated file will be very important.

Basic method:

return render_to_response('stylesheet.css',
    { 'domain': 'http://static.mydomain.com/' },
    context_instance=RequestContext(request),
    mimetype='text/css'
)

Alternatively, you can set up hosts on your system that map the static domains back to localhost for development purposes. Then, you can reference the domain as normal, but it'll still pull from your development files. Also, if you happen to have Ruby installed on your system, you can make use of a rubygem called Ghost. It lets you easily create, enable, disable, and delete custom hosts right from the command-line with no fuss.

If you want to use {% static %} tag in your CSS file, you should use {% include %} tag. Here is an example to do so:

foo.html

{% load static %}
{% load i18n %}
{% load widget_tweaks %}

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <style>
        {% include "path/to/custom_styles_1.css" %}
    </style>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="{% static 'css/custom_styles_2.css' %}">
</head>
<body>
<!-- Your HTML body -->
</body>
</html>

custom_styles_1.css

{% load static%}

{
     background: url('{% static "/img/logo.png" %}')
}

custom_styles_2.css

.fa {
    position: relative;
    text-align: center;
    font-family: BTitrBold;
    font-size: 3.5em;
}

.name {
    position: absolute;
    top: 37%;
    right: 15%;
}

.school {
    position: absolute;
    top: 530px;
    right: 200px;
}

.id {
    position: absolute;
    top: 700px;
    right: 200px;
}

.degree {
    position: absolute;
    top: 740px;
    left: 195px;
}

custom_styles_1.css is the CSS file that includes {% static %} tag. You should integrate it with your foo.html file with {% include %} tag. In this way, Django will put all the styles you need at the appropriate place and render the static tags correctly.

custom_styles_2.css is a normal CSS file located in STATIC_ROOT directory, so you can use {% static %} tag for it without any problem.

If you're using django-libsass to generate your css, you can use custom functions to bridge django and the sass precompiler.

As a matter of fact, the function static is already implemented, and you can use it:

.foo {
    background: url(static("myapp/image/bar.png"));
}

as described here: https://github.com/torchbox/django-libsass#custom-functions

There might be a way to get django to treat the CSS file like a template (I'm not very familiar with django) but you might want to try a different solution instead: use a dynamic stylesheet language such as LESS or Sass. With LESS it would be as simple as

@base: "//static.example.com/"

#logo {
    background: url(%("%s/logo.png", @base))
}

If your images aren't too big you can use data URIs, which can be embedded right in the css file without any links. They look like this:

.box-with-background {
  background-image: url('data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgI=')
  background-repeat: repeat;
}

Usually they're a bit longer then the one I've shown. You can generate them with javascript and you can find some online generators.

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