'collectstatic' command fails when WhiteNo

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:

Post-processing 'css/iconic/open-iconic-bootstrap.css' failed!

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./manage.py", line 10, in <module>
    execute_from_command_line(sys.argv)
  File "/home/Pieter/.virtualenvs/radiant/lib/python3.4/site-packages/django/core/management/__init__.py", line 385, in execute_from_command_line
    utility.execute()
  File "/home/Pieter/.virtualenvs/radiant/lib/python3.4/site-packages/django/core/management/__init__.py", line 377, in execute
    self.fetch_command(subcommand).run_from_argv(self.argv)
  File "/home/Pieter/.virtualenvs/radiant/lib/python3.4/site-packages/django/core/management/base.py", line 288, in run_from_argv
    self.execute(*args, **options.__dict__)
  File "/home/Pieter/.virtualenvs/radiant/lib/python3.4/site-packages/django/core/management/base.py", line 338, in execute
    output = self.handle(*args, **options)
  File "/home/Pieter/.virtualenvs/radiant/lib/python3.4/site-packages/django/core/management/base.py", line 533, in handle
    return self.handle_noargs(**options)
  File "/home/Pieter/.virtualenvs/radiant/lib/python3.4/site-packages/django/contrib/staticfiles/management/commands/collectstatic.py", line 168, in handle_noargs
    collected = self.collect()
  File "/home/Pieter/.virtualenvs/radiant/lib/python3.4/site-packages/django/contrib/staticfiles/management/commands/collectstatic.py", line 120, in collect
    raise processed
  File "/home/Pieter/.virtualenvs/radiant/lib/python3.4/site-packages/django/contrib/staticfiles/storage.py", line 242, in post_process
    content = pattern.sub(converter, content)
  File "/home/Pieter/.virtualenvs/radiant/lib/python3.4/site-packages/django/contrib/staticfiles/storage.py", line 181, in converter
    hashed_url = self.url(unquote(joined_result), force=True)
  File "/home/Pieter/.virtualenvs/radiant/lib/python3.4/site-packages/django/contrib/staticfiles/storage.py", line 128, in url
    hashed_name = self.stored_name(clean_name)
  File "/home/Pieter/.virtualenvs/radiant/lib/python3.4/site-packages/django/contrib/staticfiles/storage.py", line 277, in stored_name
    cache_name = self.clean_name(self.hashed_name(name))
  File "/home/Pieter/.virtualenvs/radiant/lib/python3.4/site-packages/django/contrib/staticfiles/storage.py", line 91, in hashed_name
    (clean_name, self))
ValueError: The file 'css/fonts/open-iconic.eot' could not be found with <whitenoise.django.GzipManifestStaticFilesStorage object at 0x7f57fc5b1550>.

The static collection command runs without incident when I comment out this line in my settings:

STATICFILES_STORAGE = 'whitenoise.django.GzipManifestStaticFilesStorage'

What's going wrong here and how do I fix it? I already tried emptying my static file output folder. It runs smoothly until it starts processing one specific file.

Answer 1

The problem here is that css/iconic/open-iconic-bootstrap.css is referencing a file, open-iconic.eot, which doesn't exist in the expected location.

When you run collectstatic with that storage backend Django attempts to rewrite all the URLs in your CSS files so they reference the files by their new names e.g, css/iconic/open-iconic.8a7442ca6bed.eot. If it can't find the file it stops with that error.

Answer 2

It worked for me by commenting out the whitenoise in settings.py in production.

#STATICFILES_STORAGE = 'whitenoise.django.GzipManifestStaticFilesStorage'
#WHITENOISE_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'staticfiles')

Answer 3

Be sure to check all your settings related to static files, especially making sure the paths are pointing to the right locations. I personally had one of my STATICFILES_DIRS pointing to a wrong path.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

The whitenoise.django.GzipManifestStaticFilesStorage alias has now been removed. Instead you should use the correct import path: whitenoise.storage.CompressedManifestStaticFilesStorage.

As per the doc here.