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1.
No, Django should not be serving your static files on a production server. Apache (or whatever server you use) should serve the static files, often found in a directory /static/. That’s what collectstatic does: it collects all the static files from all your Django apps and it puts them in STATIC_ROOT so your server can serve the files.
Locally you can serve the static files by adjusting your urlpatterns in urls.py.
It’s a pity that you can’t use collectstatic because that’s how Django is intended to be used.
2.
As said above, that’s not what should happen.
Now, to answer your question, you could create symbolic links in your STATIC_ROOT to all the locations where your static files are located. So a symbolic link to each static directory of each Django app.