What's the point of Django's collectstatic?

Question

This is probably a stupid question, but it\'s just not clicking in my head.

In Django, the convention is to put all of your static files (i.e css, js) specific to y

Answer 1

In the production installation, you want to have persistent URLs. The URL doesn't change unless the file content changes.

This is to prevent having clients to have wrong version of CSS or JS file on their computer when opening a web page from Django. Django staticfiles detects file changes and updates URLs accordingly, so that if CSS or JS file changes the web browser downloads the new version.

This is usually achieved by adding MD5 hash to the filename during collectstatic run.

Edit: Also see related answer to multiple apps.