'collectstatic' command fails when WhiteNoise is enabled

Question

I\'m trying to serve static files through WhiteNoise as per Heroku\'s recommendation. When I run collectstatic in my development environment, this happens:

Answer 1

The issue here is that using

STATICFILES_STORAGE = 'whitenoise.storage.CompressedManifestStaticFilesStorage'

or

STATICFILES_STORAGE = 'django.contrib.staticfiles.storage.ManifestStaticFilesStorage

uses Django's static file storage in a different way than runserver does. See the Django docs for some explanation: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.11/ref/contrib/staticfiles/#django.contrib.staticfiles.storage.ManifestStaticFilesStorage.manifest_strict

I believe the referenced manifest gets built when you run collectstatic, so doing so should fix this problem temporarily, but you likely don't want to run collectstatic before every test run if you have modified any static files. Another solution would be to disable this setting for your tests, and just run it in production.