Heroku & Django: "OSError: No such file or directory: '/app/{myappname}/static'"

Question

I have a Django app on Heroku. I am having some problems with static files (they are loading in one Heroku environment but not another), so I tried the debug command recommended here.

$ heroku run python manage.py collectstatic --noinput
Running `python manage.py collectstatic --noinput` attached to terminal... up, run.8771
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/app/{myappname}/static'

Here is my settings.py, which is the same thing Heroku recommends:

import os
import os.path

BASE_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__))
STATIC_ROOT = 'staticfiles'
STATIC_URL = '/static/'

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

I get the error whether or not I actually have a directory "static" at the root level in my Git repo (tested it both ways).

Any ideas?

Answer 1

It's looking for a folder named 'static' that's next to the settings.py, i.e. in the project folder, not at the root of the git repo.

git root/
git root/{app name}
git root/{app name}/settings.py
git root/{app name}/static/         <- this is what you're missing

Note that empty folders aren't tracked by git, so you'll have to put a blank file in there if it's empty. Alternatively, remove the STATICFILES_DIRS setting until you need it.