django heroku media files 404 error

Question

I recently deployed a Django app to Heroku and uploaded some media files and everything seemed to work fine, until yesterday when i tried to access the application again and

Answer 1

My guess would be that something is off with your static files.

For example, you have

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

For my Heroku app, I have

STATICFILES_DIRS = (
    os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'static'),
)

Settings for static files is something that few people seem to really understand (including myself), but this blog post offers a pretty good explanation: http://blog.doismellburning.co.uk/2012/06/25/django-and-static-files/