Warning about Django's STATIC_ROOT directory not found when WHITENOISE_USE_FINDERS is true

Thanks for developing whitenoise 👍

I have a use case where I’d like whitenoise to transparently handle all the static files for a Django application. The amount of static files is minimal and gets little to no traffic.

Reproducing this particular issue should be fairly easy:

• whitenoise.middleware.WhiteNoiseMiddleware in the settings.py MIDDLEWARE list
• WHITENOISE_USE_FINDERS = True in settings.py
• Set STATIC_ROOT to a path that doesn’t exist yet (because Django creates this only when running collectstatic, which I’d actually like to avoid)

Running manage.py runserver will raise a warning like this:

.tox/runserver/lib/python3.6/site-packages/whitenoise/base.py:104: UserWarning: No directory at: /var/www/static
  warnings.warn(u'No directory at: {}'.format(root))

The warning isn’t a blocker: it doesn’t prevent runserver or a wsgi server from starting. The warning might not be relevant when WHITENOISE_USE_FINDERS is True, though.

[pawelad]

My pytest solution (just put it in your conftest.py):

import pytest


@pytest.fixture(autouse=True)
def whitenoise_autorefresh(settings):
    """
    Get rid of whitenoise "No directory at" warning, as it's not helpful when running tests.

    Related:
        - https://github.com/evansd/whitenoise/issues/215
        - https://github.com/evansd/whitenoise/issues/191
        - https://github.com/evansd/whitenoise/commit/4204494d44213f7a51229de8bc224cf6d84c01eb
    """
    settings.WHITENOISE_AUTOREFRESH = True

[evansd]

Unfortunately there’s no completely clean way of dealing with this. Ideally we’d set STATIC_ROOT to None as a way of signalling that we never intend to write anything to it and then WhiteNoise would ignore the setting. But Django throws an ImproperlyConfigured exception if you try to do that. So you have to set it to a filesystem path, and WhiteNoise then has no way of knowing that you intended the directory to be missing.

Probably the easiest thing to do is to silence the warning by adding something like the following to you settings file:

import warnings
warnings.filterwarnings("ignore", message="No directory at", module="whitenoise.base" )