"Serving files uploaded by a user during development" example unclear about "urls.py"

[Josef Richter]

Documentation at ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/howto/static-files/#serving-files-uploaded-by-a-user-during-development suggests amendments to urls.py

If you followed the "Writing your first Django app" tutorial over here ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/intro/tutorial01/, you may end up with two files mysite/urls.py and polls/urls.py and likely to make the above amendment to polls/urls.py, which is incorrect. The files in that case get uploaded to polls/media/images and then cannot be served (404). The documentation should make it clear the amendment needs to be done in mysite/urls.py.

For a person writing Django code for the very first time this is not obvious. I resolved the issue with the help of Django IRC community.

[Tim Graham]

It seems like a basic understanding of how the URL system works would get you to the right answer, but... would it be more clear to you if it said, "you can do this by adding the following snippet to your ROOT_URLCONF" (changing urls.py to ROOT_URLCONF). I don't think referencing the filenames in the tutorial here is a good idea.

[Amankumar Singh]

​https://github.com/django/django/pull/13978

[GitHub <noreply@…>]

In 51637222:

Fixed #32419 -- Clarified URLconf in example of serving media files.

[Josef Richter]

Replying to Tim Graham:

It seems like a basic understanding of how the URL system works would get you to the right answer, but... would it be more clear to you if it said, "you can do this by adding the following snippet to your ROOT_URLCONF" (changing urls.py to ROOT_URLCONF). I don't think referencing the filenames in the tutorial here is a good idea.

Yes, probably. I'm just saying it's an easy mistake to make for a beginner who sees Django for the first time in their life and don't know the details of its URL system, structuring the app, etc. And it's hard to identify and fix that mistake for a beginner.

[Mariusz Felisiak <felisiak.mariusz@…>]

In d192d751:

[3.2.x] Fixed #32419 -- Clarified URLconf in example of serving media files.

Backport of 51637222b6eeed81d9ce6f5d24e22e249c605ba3 from master