Editing Running a Django Application on IIS (section)

=== Static files ===

With the preceding `web.config` configuration, all the requests are routed to the Django application. However, we want the static files of our application to be managed by IIS itself. To do that, we first configure Django to collect the static files in the `static` subdirectory of our project. For that, we have the following configuration in our `settings.py` file:

<syntaxhighlight lang="python">
SITE_ROOT = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__))
...
STATIC_URL = '/static/'
...
STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join( SITE_ROOT, 'static')
SITE_STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join( SITE_ROOT, 'local_static')

# Additional locations of static files
STATICFILES_DIRS = (
    # Don't forget to use absolute paths, not relative paths.
    ('', SITE_STATIC_ROOT),
)
..
</syntaxhighlight>

The project wide defined static files are located in the `local_static` directory. All the static files are collected in the `static` directory by running the following command:

<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">
python manage.py collecstatic
</syntaxhighlight>

In the `local_static` directory we put the following `web.config` file:

<syntaxhighlight lang="xml">
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <!-- this configuration overrides the FastCGI handler to let IIS serve the static files -->
    <handlers>
    <clear/>
      <add name="StaticFile" path="*" verb="*" modules="StaticFileModule" resourceType="File" requireAccess="Read" />
    </handlers>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>
</syntaxhighlight>

Which basically inverts the `web.config` file or the root of the project by clearing all the handlers and serving all requests only as static files. When collected, this file will go in the `static` directory and will instruct IIS that all requests below the path `/static` should be served as static files.