Django and Static Assets

Last Updated: 05 April 2014

assets collectstatic django python static

Django settings for static assets can be a bit difficult to configure and debug.

However, if you just add the following settings to your settings.py, everything should work exactly as you expect:

settings.py

# Static asset configuration
import os
PROJECT_PATH = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__))
STATIC_ROOT = 'staticfiles'
STATIC_URL = '/static/'

STATICFILES_DIRS = (
    os.path.join(PROJECT_PATH, 'static'),
)

To serve static files in production, you can use the dj-static library.

$ pip install dj-static
...
$ pip freeze > requirements.txt

Next, you can add the following code to wsgi.py to serve static files in production:

wsgi.py

from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application
from dj_static import Cling

application = Cling(get_wsgi_application())

Your application will now serve static assets directly from Gunicorn in production. This will be perfectly adequate for most applications, but top-tier applications may want to explore using a CDN with Django-Storages.

Automatic Collectstatic

When a Django application is deployed to Heroku, collectstatic is run automatically when it is configured properly.

Detection

We determine if collectstatic is configured by running the following against your codebase:

$ python manage.py collectstatic --dry-run --noinput

If required configurations are missing, this command will fail and no collectstatic support will be applied to your application.

Debugging

To learn more about why your application’s collectstatic isn’t configured, you can use heroku run:

$ heroku run python manage.py collectstatic --noinput
...
django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: You're using the staticfiles app without having set the STATIC_ROOT setting.

Disabling Collectstatic

Sometimes, you may not want Heroku to run collectstatic on your behalf. You can disable collectstatic with the DISABLE_COLLECTSTATIC configuration:

$ heroku config:set DISABLE_COLLECTSTATIC=1