Django serve static index.html with view at ‘/’ url

You can serve static/index.html for development like this:

if settings.DEBUG:
    urlpatterns += url(
        r'^$', 'django.contrib.staticfiles.views.serve', kwargs={
            'path': 'index.html', 'document_root': settings.STATIC_ROOT}),

But for production you should configure your nginx (or other frontend server) to serve index.html file for / location

UPDATE

I want to explain the case you should do like this. For example your django app is only admin and api view, but client interacts with a single page app (Ember, Angular, whatever). So you project has at least two subprojects, one with your main django app and the second is a client app with all html/js/css stuff. It is very convenient to have client scripts separate from django backend, it allows your frontend developers to do their job and avoid django existence (someday it can be moved to the distinct repo).

So in this case you get the following build workflow:

1. Run client app sources watcher to rebuild your scripts/styles/templates (brunch watch, grunt job or gulp watch task)
2. Collect static with django for production
3. Make sure you have urlpatterns fix for developments and right nginx config for production

Here is my urls.py example

urlpatterns += patterns(
    'django.contrib.staticfiles.views',
    url(r'^(?:index.html)?$', 'serve', kwargs={'path': 'index.html'}),
    url(r'^(?P<path>(?:js|css|img)/.*)$', 'serve'),
)