[Django]-Why won't collectstatic copy my static files?

That just happened to me and I accidentally put the app’s static files directory in the .gitignore file. So on my local machine it got collected just fine, but in production the static files were actually missing (gitignored).

just do this and make the naming convention same

STATIC_URL = '/static/'
STATICFILES_DIRS = [
    os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'static')
]
STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'assets')

static directory contains all off your project assets

assets directory will create automatic when u run this cmd

python3 manage.py collectstatic

this will copy all static folder content into assets folder

hope this helps 🙂

your are missing the STATIC_ROOT where your static files going to be copied just
add this line in your settings.py

STATIC_ROOT=os.path.join(BASE_DIR,'staticfiles')

your settings.py looks like this :

STATIC_URL = '/static/'
STATIC_ROOT=os.path.join(BASE_DIR,'staticfiles')

#added manully

STATICFILES_DIRS = [
   os.path.join(BASE_DIR, "static")
    
]

remember to add STAIC_ROOT path in urls.py

from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path, include
from django.conf import settings
from django.conf.urls.static import static




urlpatterns = [
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
    path("" ,include("home.urls")),
 
]+static(settings.STATIC_URL, document_root=settings.STATIC_ROOT) 

After all of it you can run :

python manage.py collectstatic

it will create a staticfiles folder for you in your Dir

This happened to me because while investigating a bug occurring on certain dates, changed my computer date and time.

Hence it disturbed things like collectstatic, and also my browser history.

Don’t change your computer date and time.

I was under the impression the comparison would be content based. It turned out to be date based. So, don’t mess with your files after collecstatic.

One Quick work-around, although this does not fix it or explain WHY it’s happening, is to:

1. go to your project’s file directory & rename your project’s
   ‘static’ folder to something else like ‘static-old’
2. create a new,empty folder called ‘static’ in your project directory
3. now if you run python manage.py collectstatic it will see that nothing is
   in your static folder and will copy ALL static files over.

if you have setup everything properly for static and you are using nginx then enter this command

sudo nginx -t

You will see error why your static files aren’t being served and fix that specific error

In my case I gave wrong path in my nginx config

location /static {
        root /home/ubuntu/myproject/app/static/;
    }