I wanted to include a commit date and hash in my application.

For this I generated the commit date and hash, when deploying, as static file. The static files then got pushed to my configured storage via collectstatic.

This static files were then included via template tags in my templates. For this I needed to use the static_storage.open with the relative path (of the apps static directory).

# Original files are at app_name/static/app_name/commit.txt
handle = static_storage.open('app_name/commit.txt')

At first I struggled because I though I can use url or path from the static_storage module, but these methods only give you the valid url. Accessing the contents of files from these urls won’t work with the std lib open methods.

As a bonus, I only showed them in the template when DEBUG was True.