What does Django do with `MEDIA_ROOT`?

What does Django do with MEDIA_ROOT exactly? I never understood it. Since Django itself doesn't serve static media, and you have to set up apache or something similar for it, why d开发者_运维技巧oes it care in which directory it sits?

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You're not the only one who wonders; check out Django ticket #10650. Based on the comments by Django developers there, I think this pretty much sums up what MEDIA_ROOT is used for:

Unfortunately, Django is also at fault for being far too vague in its docs about what MEDIA_ROOT and MEDIA_URL are used for. Searching through Django's code confirms that MEDIA_ROOT & MEDIA_URL are used for file upload, and that MEDIA_URL is provided as a convenience to templates via the default context processors (available when using RequestContext??).

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It appears to be used by some classes in Django as a default -- for instance, FileSystemStorage uses it as the default place to store files.

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When you creates a model with ImageField or FileField attributes, you should pass the upload_to argument. That is a relative path will be appended to your MEDIA_ROOT path and there will be save and retrieve that files.