Defining relative paths in the settings

Django requires you to define different file paths in the settings, such as the root of your media, the root of your static files, the path to templates, the path to translation files, and so on. For each developer of your project, the paths may differ as the virtual environment can be set up anywhere and the user might be working on Mac OS X, Linux, or Windows. Anyway, there is a way to define these paths that are relative to your Django project directory.

Getting ready

To start with, open settings.py.

How to do it…

Modify your path-related settings accordingly instead of hardcoding the paths to your local directories, as follows:

# settings.py
# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-
from __future__ import unicode_literals
import os

BASE_DIR = os.path.abspath(
    os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), "..")
)

MEDIA_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, "myproject", "media")

STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, "myproject", "static")

STATICFILES_DIRS = (
    os.path.join(BASE_DIR, "myproject", "site_static"),
)

TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
    os.path.join(BASE_DIR, "myproject", "templates"),
)

LOCALE_PATHS = (
    os.path.join(BASE_DIR, "locale"),
)

FILE_UPLOAD_TEMP_DIR = os.path.join(
    BASE_DIR, "myproject", "tmp"
)

How it works…

At first, we define BASE_DIR, which is an absolute path to one level higher than the settings.py file. Then, we set all the paths relative to BASE_DIR using the os.path.join function.

See also

• The Including external dependencies in your project recipe