Why django has collectstatic?

Question

Thinking about a project that has an app called 'website', and has a 'static' folder inside, that contains all the project's static files, why do I have to collect all static files and put at another folder, instead of just map the static folder (website/static) on my webserver? What's the real need to Django collect static files? Just because there are a lot of apps, and you could put your static file in different folders? Or, are there more than that involved?

Answer 1

Because of the pluggable app philosophy of django made apparent by their whole encapsulated app structure (urls, views, models, templates, etc., are app specific).

You can see this philosophy pressed further in the latest django project structure where project names are not to be included in the imports / apps are imported globally: from myapp import models and not from project.myapp import models

If you install an app from a third party, you don't need to painstakingly figure out where the application lives, django can simply move it to your environment specific static file serving location.

Simply add to INSTALLED_APPS and you can gain almost all of the functionality of a third party app whose files live who knows where, from templates to models to static files.

PS: I personally don't use the app-directory static file system unless I am making an app pluggable. It's harder to find and maintain IMO when files live absolutely everywhere.