[Django]-Why does my Django admin site not have styles / CSS loading?

After setting up your STATIC_ROOT and STATIC_URL, you may have to run

python manage.py collectstatic

I broke my head over it for two days trying whatnot!

Finally, changed DEBUG in the settings.py file to:

DEBUG = True

and it worked.

P.S:

SECURITY WARNING: don't run with debug turned on in production!

ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX is deprecated now, use STATIC_URL instead. Setting STATIC_URL = '/static/' in settings.py should do the job. Try:

import os.path  
import sys

PROJECT_ROOT = os.path.normpath(os.path.dirname(__file__))

and then:

STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(PROJECT_ROOT, 'static')
STATIC_URL = '/static/'

Works on Django 1.4 pre-alpha SVN-16920.

I read several other threads trying to fix this…resorted to an alias as in other threads.
This assumes that your own custom app is serving static files correctly, which would indicate that your STATIC_ROOT and STATIC_URL have proper settings.

STATIC_ROOT = ''
STATIC_URL = '/static/'

Then (from your static directory):

ubuntu@ip-1-2-3-4:/srv/www/mysite.com/app_folder/static$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/django/contrib/admin/static/admin/ admin

Hope this helps someone…there are a lot of threads on this topic.

I ran into this issue as well following the Django Book Tutorial.
In Chapter 5|Installing the model, the book states when referring to the default INSTALLED_APPS-
“Temporarily comment out all six of those strings by putting a hash character (#) in front of them.”
http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/chapter05.html

Then, in Chapter 6, the Book tells the reader to uncomment 4 of those 6 lines-
“note that we commented out these four INSTALLED_APPS entries in Chapter 5. Uncomment them now.”

But the statcifiles line is what is needed to restore CSS to the admin page, so uncomment that
‘django.contrib.staticfiles’,

In /project_name/project_name/settings.py you need to set STATIC_URL to tell your site what url to use for static files.

Then set STATIC_ROOT to be some folder on your filesystem that is not the same as any of your directories listed in STATICFILES_DIRS list.

Once STATICFILES_ROOT is set, you would run python manage.py collectstatic from the project directory.

This will copy all the admin static files and all files in any other folders listed in the STATICFILES_DIRS list. Basically this puts all your static files in one place so you you can move them to your CDN when deploying your site. If you are like me and don’t have a CDN, then you have two options:

1. Add the folder you set as STATIC_ROOT to the STATICFILES_DIRS list. This will allow the staticfiles finders in django to locate all the static files.
2. Move the entire folder of static files somewhere else on your file system and direct STATICFILES_DIRS to include that new location.

I make no comments about security with this answer, it is just the way I have been able to develop with my web server for small projects. I expect that you will want a CDN as django suggest if you are doing anything larger scale.

UPDATE:
I just ran into this issue and this method didn’t quite do what I think you want. What ended up working for me was after I ran collectstatic I just copied the admin static files that it put into STATICFILES_ROOT into the directory that I had used for my own static files. That solved the issue for me.

I see there are many answers but none of them worked for me, so I’m posting my own.
What solved it for me was adding a static files URL to the root URLs of the app. I needed to add this URL to my URLs list:

urlpatterns += static(settings.STATIC_URL, document_root=settings.STATIC_ROOT)

You will also need these two imports:

from django.conf import settings
from django.conf.urls.static import stati

More can be viewed in this article.

run: python manage.py collectstatic

Add this line to Vhost which located at : /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf

Alias /static/admin/ /var/www/html/example.com/static/admin

Here is entire Vhost setting for django setup

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerName gautam.tech
        ServerAlias www.gautam.tech

        WSGIDaemonProcess gautam.tech python-path=/var/www/html/gautam.tech python-home=/var/www/html/gautam.tech/venv
        WSGIProcessGroup gautam.tech
        #Your static files location
        Alias /static /var/www/html/gautam.tech/static
        Alias /media/ /var/www/html/gautam.tech/media
        Alias /static/admin/ /var/www/html/gautam.tech/static/admin

        <Directory /var/www/html/gautam.tech/static>
                Require all granted
        </Directory>

        <Directory /var/www/html/gautam.tech/media>
                       Require all granted
        </Directory>

        WSGIScriptAlias / /var/www/html/gautam.tech/myproject/wsgi.py

        DocumentRoot /var/www/html/gautam.tech
        <Directory /var/www/html/gautam.tech>
                <Files wsgi.py>
                        Require all granted
                </Files>
        </Directory>

        CustomLog /var/www/html/gautam.tech/access.log combined
        ErrorLog /var/www/html/gautam.tech/error.log
</VirtualHost>

This will work for sure!

Ensure that 'django.contrib.staticfiles' is in your INSTALLED_APPS in your settings.py

In addition to many of the other answers being useful, I had a problem that hasn’t yet been noted. After upgrading from Django 1.3 to 1.6, my static files directory had a broken symbolic link to the django admin static files.

My settings.py was configured with:

STATICFILES_DIRS = (
    '/var/www/static/my-dev',
)

According to this answer,

Django will now expect to find the admin static files under the URL
/admin/.

I had a symbolic link /var/www/static/my-dev/admin which was set to:

admin -> /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/django/contrib/admin/media/

That location no longer exists in django 1.6, so I updated the link to:

admin -> /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/django/contrib/admin/static/admin/

And now my admin site is working properly.

In the issue is in a dev/test/prod server and using Nginx, please follow the below steps.

• set the configs in settings.py as something below

  STATIC_URL = '/static/'
  
  BASE_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__)))
  STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'static')
  

• Run the below command to create css and js files in static folder

  $ python manage.py collectstatic
  

• config in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/example (Nginx) to serve static files

  location /static/ {
          alias /project/root/folder/static/;
  }
  

If you are using Apache server to host your django site, you need to make sure the static alias point to your /directory to site/site_media/static/. If your static files are in /directory to site/site/site_media/static/, the previous Apache alias configuration will not work.

While following the Django tutorial, I had a similar problem and in my case the issue was the mimetype used by the development server when serving css files.

The mimetype served was ‘application/x-css’ which led to following warning message in Chrome (in the ‘Network’ tab of the Developer tools):

Resource interpreted as Stylesheet but transferred with MIME type
application/x-css: “http://127.0.0.1:8000/static/admin/css/base.css“

The workaround that I’ve found: changing the mimetype to be served by adding following lines to the django webapp’s manage.py file:

import mimetypes
mimetypes.init()
mimetypes.types_map['.css'] = 'text/css'

Note: worked for me with Django 1.7.4 on Python 2.7 and Chrome 40.0

Same sort of issue i encountered while developing a site in django-1.10.5 and python-2.7.13. But in my firefox-51 and chrome, the login page was able to get the css but still there was no styling. But weirdly it was working on IE-8..

I tried do every possible thing mentioned here and suitable to my set of sw versions. None worked.

But when i tried the same site on other system which had the python-2.7.8, it worked..

Just posted if it may help someone…

edited: later I found that in python-2.7.13, writing the following two lines in settings.py (plus clearing the cache of the browser) had done the trick

import mimetypes
mimetypes.add_type("text/css", ".css", True)

My issue was resolved by creating new Virtual Environment for the project, before that I was using general system level python interpreter.

$ mkvirtualenv myproject

Reference: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.1/howto/windows/

this works fine and easily. I moved (manually) the folder. just you have to copy your static/admin from the directory of the main Project and paste it into public_html static/ if there is no static folder you have to run following command in terminal

python manage.py collectstatic

here you go with css working of Django admin

Admin panel was working fine except css wasn’t loaded. This worked for Lightsail Django with Apache

1.Define STATIC_ROOT and STATIC_URL in settings.py

STATIC_ROOT = '/opt/bitnami/projects/decisions/decision/'
STATIC_URL = '/static/'

2.Eject(copy) admin assets files to the project

run python manage.py collectstatic
this command creates /opt/bitnami/projects/decisions/decision/admin folder with css/ fonts/ img/ js/ subfolders

3.Make /static url accessible from apache

Paste this snippet in /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/bitnami/bitnami.conf (If you have set up ssl then the file location will be /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/bitnami/bitnami-ssl.conf)

Alias /static/ "/opt/bitnami/projects/decisions/decision/"
<Directory "/opt/bitnami/projects/decisions/decision/">
    Order allow,deny
    Options Indexes
    Allow from all
    IndexOptions FancyIndexing
</Directory>

4. Don’t forget to restart apache

sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apache

Check your settings.py file

STATIC_URL = '/static/'

there should be backslash ‘ / ‘ in both opening and closing side ..

I had to copy the files from the site-packages over to static manually.

cp -r lib/python3.10/site-packages/django/contrib/admin/static/admin static

collectstatic not doing this for me. It says 0 files copied.

If you have a value set in settings.py for STATICFILES_DIRS and the declared folder doesn’t exist or is in the wrong location, it will cause the Admin to have no styling e.g. by defining:

STATICFILES_DIRS = ( os.path.join(BASE_DIR,"static"))

And the static folder doesn’t exist .

Failing after trying 1000s of suggestions, I finally found a solution that helped. Here is what I tried and what I was using.
I am using django-1.11 and nginx web server.
Firstly, I made sure that my CSS/js files are not getting 404 in browser’s console. After that, I could see a warning

Resource interpreted as Stylesheet but transferred with mime type text/plain

I found the base.html in admin templates and removed

type="text/css"

and now the lines looks like this:

<link rel="stylesheet"  href="{% block stylesheet %}{% static "admin/css/base.css" %}{% endblock %}" /> 

This fixed the issue for me.

Configuring static files

Make sure that django.contrib.staticfiles is included in your INSTALLED_APPS.

In your settings.py file, define STATIC_URL, for example:

STATIC_URL = '/static/'

For more details see
static files ^{[django-docs]}