How does Django serve media files?

Serving static content from Django is discouraged from the developer themselves (if I'm not wrong, it only works when in debug mode). You should use a dedicated web server, instead.

If you really need to do that, anyway, read the documentation on how to serve static files.

FOR DEVELOPMENT ONLY

You can setup a static media server for use with their development server by doing this in your urls.py file. I have attached the code showing how I use it (along with the forced DEBUG conditionals.)

from django.conf import settings
from django.conf.urls.defaults import *      

# Uncomment the next two lines to enable the admin:
from django.contrib import admin
admin.autodiscover()

urlpatterns = patterns('', 
    (r'^$', 'views.index'),            

    # Accounts
    (r'^accounts/login/$', 'views.user_login'),
    (r'^accounts/logout/$', 'views.user_logout'),

    # Contrib Modules
    (r'^admin/(.*)', admin.site.root),
)

if settings.DEBUG :
    urlpatterns += patterns('',
        (r'^media/(?P<path>.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve', {'document_root': settings.MEDIA_ROOT, 'show_indexes': True}),
    )

I place my MEDIA_ROOT in a subdirectory of html/media and link to it as such in settings.py

MEDIA_ROOT = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'html/media/').replace('\\','/')

After development is finished, the project gets deployed to the web server where static media files are then served by Apache using directives.