I’ve just discovered [Django][django]’s development server always serves admin media. This is tremendously useful because it means you don’t need to configure a static serve view in your project `urls.py` during development.

However what bit me was I wanted to use a customised set of admin media and had configured a view for the `ADMIN_MEDIA_URL` path and was going batty trying to work out why Django was ignoring it. It used to be that as long as you had `DEBUG = False` in `settings.py` then the development server did not try to help serve the admin media automatically.

[Changeset 6075][6075] added a switch to the runserver command for over-riding the admin media directory.

python manage.py runserver –adminmedia /path/to/custom/media

That change was made more than two years ago. It is [right there in the documentation][docs]. A little bit of magic that wasted fifteen minutes of my frantic schedule (except for the fact I do not have a frantic schedule).

[django]: http://www.djangoproject.com/
[6075]: http://code.djangoproject.com/changeset/6075
[docs]: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/django-admin/#djadminopt—adminmedia