Turn off caching of static files in Django development server

@Erik Forsberg’s answer worked for me. Here’s what I had to do:

• Comment out the staticfiles app from INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py:

  INSTALLED_APPS = (
      'django.contrib.auth',
      'django.contrib.contenttypes',
      'django.contrib.sessions',
      'django.contrib.sites',
      'django.contrib.messages',
      #'django.contrib.staticfiles',
  )
  

• Leave my STATIC_URL variable set in settings.py:

  STATIC_URL = '/static/'
  

• Add an entry to my project’s base urls.py:

  # static files w/ no-cache headers
  url(r'^static/(?P<path>.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve',
      {'document_root': settings.STATIC_ROOT}),
  

Note that I’m also setting the Cache-Control headers in a middleware class nocache.py:

class NoCache(object):
    def process_response(self, request, response):
        """
        set the "Cache-Control" header to "must-revalidate, no-cache"
        """
        if request.path.startswith('/static/'):
            response['Cache-Control'] = 'must-revalidate, no-cache'
        return response

And then including that in settings.py:

if DEBUG:
    MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
        'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
        'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
        'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware',
        'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
        'django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware',
        'nocache.NoCache',
    )

My very simple solution:

from django.contrib.staticfiles.views import serve
from django.views.decorators.cache import never_cache

static_view = never_cache(serve)
urlpatterns += static_view(settings.MEDIA_URL,
                           document_root=settings.MEDIA_ROOT)

Django’s contrib.staticfiles app automatically serves staticfiles for you by overriding the runserver command. With this configuration you can’t control the way it serves the static files.

You can prevent the staticfiles app from serving the static files by adding the --nostatic option to the runserver command:

./manage.py runserver --nostatic

Then you can write an url config to manually serve the static files with headers that prevent the browser from caching the response:

from django.conf import settings
from django.contrib.staticfiles.views import serve as serve_static
from django.views.decorators.cache import never_cache

urlpatterns = patterns('', )

if settings.DEBUG:
    urlpatterns += patterns('',
        url(r'^static/(?P<path>.*)$', never_cache(serve_static)),
    )

If you want your manage.py runserver command to have the --nostatic option on by default, you can put this in your manage.py:

if '--nostatic' not in sys.argv:
    sys.argv.append('--nostatic')

This has nothing with Django, because nothing changed after I reinstall Django using pip.

This is the behavior of browser, so you just need to clear cached images files of your browser.

Ref

Chrome Clear cache and cookies

For newer Django, the way middleware classes are written has changed a bit.

Follow all the instructions from @aaronstacy above, but for the middleware class, use this:

class NoCache(object):
    def __init__(self, get_response):
        self.get_response = get_response

    def __call__(self, request):
        response = self.get_response(request)
        response['Cache-Control'] = 'must-revalidate, no-cache'
        return response

In newer versions of Django a very simple solution is modify the project urls like so:

from django.conf.urls.static import static
from django.contrib.staticfiles.views import serve
from django.views.decorators.cache import cache_control
from django.conf import settings

# YOUR urlpatterns here... 

if settings.DEBUG:
    urlpatterns += static(settings.STATIC_URL, view=cache_control(no_cache=True, must_revalidate=True)(serve))

I arrived at this by looking at how staticfiles modifies the urls automatically and just adding a view decorator. I really don’t understand why this isn’t the default as this is for development ONLY. The view is able to properly handle a “If-Modified-Since” HTTP header so a request is always made but contents are only transferred on changes (judged by looking at the modification timestamp on the file).

For this to work you must add --nostatic when using runserver, otherwise the above changes are simply ignored.

IMPORTANT EDIT: What I had before didn’t work because I wasn’t using --nostatic and the never_cache decorator also included no-store which meant unchanged files were always being re-transferred instead of returning 304 Not Modified

It’s so simple if you are using Django 2.0+

Step-1 : Make ‘django.contrib.staticfiles’ as comment in settings.py(Project level)

INSTALLED_APPS = [

# 'django.contrib.staticfiles',

]

Step-2 : Import followings in urls.py (Project level)

     from django.conf.urls.static import static

     from django.contrib.staticfiles.views import serve

     from django.views.decorators.cache import never_cache

     from . import settings

Step-3 : Add following line in urls.py(project level) after urlpatterns

urlpatterns = [

]

if settings.DEBUG:

    urlpatterns += static(settings.STATIC_URL, view=never_cache(serve))

Make sure that STATIC_URL is declared in your settings.py

STATIC_URL = '/static/'

Use whitenoise. There’s a lot of issues with the static file serving in runserver and they’re all already fixed in whitenoise. It’s also WAY faster.

They’ve talked about just replacing the built-in static serving with it, but no one has gotten around to it yet.

Steps to use it in development…

Install with pip install whitenoise

Add the following to the end of settings.py:

if DEBUG:
    MIDDLEWARE = [
        'whitenoise.middleware.WhiteNoiseMiddleware',
    ] + MIDDLEWARE
    INSTALLED_APPS = [
        'whitenoise.runserver_nostatic',
    ] + INSTALLED_APPS

The staticfiles app implements serving of static files by overriding the runserver command. We can do the same: override this command again and implement a custom handler which turns off caching.

Note that your django application must be before django.contrib.staticfiles in INSTALLED_APPS, otherwise your command will be ignored.

# your_django_app/management/commands/runserver.py

from django.utils.cache import add_never_cache_headers
from django.contrib.staticfiles.handlers import (
    StaticFilesHandler as BaseStaticFilesHandler,
)
from django.contrib.staticfiles.management.commands.runserver import (
    Command as RunserverCommand,
)


class StaticFilesHandler(BaseStaticFilesHandler):
    def serve(self, request):
        response = super().serve(request)
        add_never_cache_headers(response)
        return response


class Command(RunserverCommand):
    def get_handler(self, *args, **options):
        handler = super().get_handler(*args, **options)

        # Check that serving static files is enabled
        if isinstance(handler, BaseStaticFilesHandler):
            # If yes, replace the original handler with our custom handler
            handler = StaticFilesHandler(handler.application)

        return handler