[Answered ]-Can you put static folder in project root, rather than app root?

Django doesn’t say any such thing. Put the static folder wherever you want, as long as you include it in STATICFILES_DIRS so that collectstatic will find it.

You can create separate static folder for all apps and set STATICFILES_DIRS accordingly.

I personally use the following project layout

project/apps/app_1
             ...
             app_n
             static        <- static files for all apps
             templates     <- templates for all apps

       /config/...
               settings.py
               ...

which I borrowed from Two Scoops of Django book