To link to static files that are saved in STATIC_ROOT Django ships with a static template tag. You can use this regardless if you're using RequestContext or not.

{% load static %} 
<img src="{% static "images/hi.jpg" %}" alt="Hi!" /> 

It is also able to consume standard context variables, for example, assuming a user_stylesheet variable is passed to the template:

{% load static %} 
<link rel="stylesheet" href="{% static user_stylesheet %}" type="text/css" media="screen" /> 

If you'd like to retrieve a static URL without displaying it, you can use a slightly different call:

{% load static %} 
{% static "images/hi.jpg" as myphoto %} 
<img src="{{ myphoto }}"></img> 

The staticfiles contrib app also ships with a static template tag which uses staticfiles STATICFILES_STORAGE to build the URL of the given path (rather than simply using urllib.parse.urljoin() with the STATIC_URL setting and the given path). Use that instead if you have an advanced use case such as using a cloud service to serve static files:

{% load static from staticfiles %} 
<img src="{% static "images/hi.jpg" %}" alt="Hi!" /> 

You should prefer the static template tag, but if you need more control over exactly where and how STATIC_URL is injected into the template, you can use the get_static_prefix template tag:

{% load static %} 
<img src="{% get_static_prefix %}images/hi.jpg" alt="Hi!" /> 

There's also a second form you can use to avoid extra processing if you need the value multiple times:

{% load static %} 
{% get_static_prefix as STATIC_PREFIX %} 
 
<img src="{{ STATIC_PREFIX }}images/hi.jpg" alt="Hi!" /> 
<img src="{{ STATIC_PREFIX }}images/hi2.jpg" alt="Hello!" /> 

Similar to the get_static_prefix, get_media_prefix populates a template variable with the media prefix MEDIA_URL, for example:

<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"> 
var media_path = '{% get_media_prefix %}'; 
</script> 

Django comes with a couple of other template-tag libraries that you have to enable explicitly in your INSTALLED_APPS setting and enable in your template with the {% load %} tag.