[Django]-Django serving robots.txt efficiently

68👍

Yes, robots.txt should not be served by Django if the file is static. Try something like this in your Nginx config file:

location  /robots.txt {
    alias  /path/to/static/robots.txt;
}

See here for more info: https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#alias

Same thing applies to the favicon.ico file if you have one.

The equivalent code for Apache config is:

Alias /robots.txt /path/to/static/robots.txt

13👍

I know this is a late reply, I was looking for similar solution when don’t have access to the web server config. So for anyone else looking for a similar solution, I found this page: http://www.techstricks.com/adding-robots-txt-to-your-django-project/

which suggests adding this to your project url.py:

from django.conf.urls import url
from django.http import HttpResponse

urlpatterns = [
    #.... your project urls
    url(r'^robots.txt', lambda x: HttpResponse("User-Agent: *\nDisallow:", content_type="text/plain"), name="robots_file"),
]

which I think should be slightly more efficient that using a template file, although it could make your url rules untidy if need multiple ‘Disallow:’ options.

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