Why does DEBUG=False setting make my django Static Files Access fail?

Question

Am building an app using Django as my workhorse. All has been well so far - specified db settings, configured static directories, urls, views etc. But trouble started sneaking in the moment I wanted to render my own beautiful and custom 404.html and 500.html pages.

I read the docs on custom error handling, and set necessary configurations in UrlsConf, created corresponding views and added the 404.html and the 500.html to my app's template directory (specified in the settings.py too).

But the docs say you can actually view custom error views until Debug is Off, so I did turn it off to test my stuff, and that's when stuff goes berserk!

Not only do I fail to view the custom 404.html (actually, it loads, but because my error pages each contain a graphic error message -as some nice image), the source of the error page loads, but nothing else loads! Not even linked CSS or Javascript!

Generally, once I set DEBUG = False, all views will load, but any linked content (CSS, Javascript, Images, etc) wont load! What's happening? Is there something am missing, concerning static files and the DEBUG setting?

Answer 1

If you still need to server static locally (e.g. for testing without debug) you can run devserver in insecure mode:

manage.py runserver --insecure