Django somehow accesses the static files even after i had deleted the whole static folder

Question

I am new to Django, I had placed the static files in the project level static folder and even in multiple applications inside the app/static/app directory. Everything was working fine until I decided to delete few of the static files. The project is surprisingly accessing the deleted static files i.e images and stylesheets. I even had deleted both the static and the staticfiles folders and it still would access the static files that I had placed in these folders. Following is a code snippet from my setting.py file.

STATICFILES_DIRS = [
    os.path.join(BASE_DIR, "static"),
    ('accounts', os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'accounts', 'static')),
    ('transport_resources', os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'transport_resources', 'static')),]
STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'staticfiles')

Whatever I do with those static files, it still manages to access the old and even deleted files. I am assuming that it keeps a cache of the files that we had used previously if this is the case, how can we clear that cache. Thanks!

Answer 1

Renaming the new files to something other than the old file names did work.

Answer 2

I came across the same problem even after I deleted and run the $ python manage.py collectstatic --clear it still manages to access the file

this is because the browser is caching static files

open it on another browser/incognito window

when I used another port problem solved

$ python manage.py runserver 9000