Does whitenoise really require collectstatic?

Question

I'm exploring using whitenoise to serve static files in a Django application that's packaged in a Docker container. In the documentation it says:

As part of deploying your application you’ll need to run ./manage.py collectstatic to put all your static files into STATIC_ROOT. (If you’re running on Heroku then this is done automatically for you.)

Is that really needed? I'm not running ./manage.py collectstatic and static files are still served.

If it's not needed, is it an optimization? I'm trying to avoid having needless steps in my deployment process.

Answer 1

As that quote states, Whitenoise serves files from STATIC_ROOT. collectstatic collects files from STATICFILES_DIRS and any app-specific static directories and puts them into STATIC_ROOT.

But there are two situations where it will serve files without running collectstatic. The first is if your files are already in STATIC_ROOT. They shouldn't be, but it's a common mistake to set the value of STATIC_ROOT to the directory containing the source files. However, in this case it won't for example find the admin files, which would need to be collected.

The other situation is if you are running with DEBUG=True. Whitenoise inherits this value for its USE_FINDERS setting, which makes it look in the same places as collectstatic itself to serve files. Clearly, you wouldn't want to run in production with DEBUG on, but you can set this setting explicitly. But as that docs link points out, doing so will disable the caching and compression features of Whitenoise.