Django serve static index.html with view at '/' url

Solution 1:

You can serve static/index.html for development like this:

if settings.DEBUG:
    urlpatterns += url(
        r'^$', 'django.contrib.staticfiles.views.serve', kwargs={
            'path': 'index.html', 'document_root': settings.STATIC_ROOT}),

But for production you should configure your nginx (or other frontend server) to serve index.html file for / location

UPDATE

I want to explain the case you should do like this. For example your django app is only admin and api view, but client interacts with a single page app (Ember, Angular, whatever). So you project has at least two subprojects, one with your main django app and the second is a client app with all html/js/css stuff. It is very convenient to have client scripts separate from django backend, it allows your frontend developers to do their job and avoid django existence (someday it can be moved to the distinct repo).

So in this case you get the following build workflow:

1. Run client app sources watcher to rebuild your scripts/styles/templates (brunch watch, grunt job or gulp watch task)
2. Collect static with django for production
3. Make sure you have urlpatterns fix for developments and right nginx config for production

Here is my urls.py example

urlpatterns += patterns(
    'django.contrib.staticfiles.views',
    url(r'^(?:index.html)?$', 'serve', kwargs={'path': 'index.html'}),
    url(r'^(?P<path>(?:js|css|img)/.*)$', 'serve'),
)

Solution 2:

You don't need to subclass TemplateView in this case. You can use TemplateView directly in your url conf, as long as index.html is in your templates directory.

from django.views.generic.base import TemplateView

urlpatterns = [
    url(r'^$', TemplateView.as_view(template_name='index.html'), name="home"),
]

Solution 3:

Check out my long explanation of how to serve index.html on / in this answer (or extended as a blog post). That solution alone might not be sufficient, however, if you want to have a full-fledged SPA served by Django (because you need frontend routing).

I've been playing with different methods for routing /static/ to /, forwarding all requests to the frontend, finding index.html files. In the end I found the best method to solve all of this was not by tweaking urls.py, but as an extension of WhiteNoise that I released as django-spa (installation instructions in the README).

You can find some of the related discussion in this WhiteNoise issue.