7. Exhibiting media and images

Adjusting the settings.py file

We will now display product images on our store page. To achieve this, insert an <img> tag within the for-loop in the store.html file to render each product's image.

{% for product in products %}

<img src="{{ product.image.url }}" width = "300" height = "450"> <!--returns the url of the image -->
<p>Product: {{ product.name }}</p>

However, when we run the page the images will be loaded but won't exhibit anything. This is because when we open the image in a new tab, we see that they are inside this url:

This url isn't specified inside our urls.py file.

In order to fix this, first we will go inside the settings.py file and add the following lines of code:

Under STATICFILES_DIRS

MEDIA_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'static/images')

MEDIA_URL = "images/"

As of now, the images added via the admin page are being saved on the main ecommerce project folder, the MEDIA_ROOTvariable now specifies where all image files should be saved

IMPORTANT: If you currently have any saved images outside the folder specified on the MEDIA_ROOT, move them into it.

On the other hand, the MEDIA_URL variable specifies what url all images will have, in this case they will have their url starting with 'images/'

Including the new urls

Now, inside the urls.py file of the main ecommerce folder, NOT the one of the store folder, add this line of code:

Below all the code

urlpatterns += static(settings.MEDIA_URL, document_root=settings.MEDIA_ROOT)

This setup adds all URLs starting with 'image/' from the MEDIA_URL, sourcing images from the directory defined by MEDIA_ROOT.

We will also need to import the static and settings functions at the start of the code:

from django.conf.urls.static import static
from django.conf import settings

Finally, when we run the page, our images will be properly displayed:

When a new product is added through the admin interface, its image is automatically rendered on the site, ensuring dynamic content updates without additional coding.

These changes were made directly on the main ecommerce urls.pyfile as we want the images to be managed on the same way for all apps