Warning shown if STATIC_ROOT directory missing in development

Hi! 😃

STR:

1. Update existing Django+WhiteNoise project from whitenoise 3.3.1 to 4.0.
2. Don’t run collectstatic (ie since developing locally), so the directory referenced by STATIC_ROOT doesn’t yet exist
3. With Django’s DEBUG = True, run ./manage.py runserver

Expected:

No console warnings about a missing static files directory.

Actual:

Warning in the console:

...
Django version 1.11.15, using settings 'treeherder.config.settings'
Starting development server at http://0.0.0.0:8000/
Quit the server with CONTROL-C.
/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/whitenoise/base.py:97: UserWarning: No directory at: /app/treeherder/static/
  warnings.warn(u'No directory at: {}'.format(root))

Notes:

• The warning was added to add_files() in 2a883f5cda0336dbefebef7bb918c3a2b167a70d.
• We don’t pre-create the STATIC_ROOT directory, since:
  • Django’s collectstatic handles the creation of the directory automatically
  • To create the directory we’d either need to use the .gitkeep type approach (which then causes collectstatic to output misleading warnings/prompts about overwriting existing files) or else have additional local setup steps prior to running ./manage.py runserver.

A possible solution might be to have .add_files() take an optional ignore_missing=False argument, which is left as False everywhere apart from the Django middleware static root usage. eg:

if self.static_root:
    self.add_files(self.static_root, prefix=self.static_prefix, ignore_missing=self.autorefresh)

That said, should static_root even be added when run in DEBUG mode? The Django docs say not to place anything in the STATIC_ROOT directory directly, so it feels like there shouldn’t be content there (though how many people go against that, I don’t know).

[kirankumbhar]

I can confirm what @Br4nd0R is saying. This issue is still there in 5.2.0

[TheBitShepherd]

@evansd - I’m using version 5.2.0 and still seeing this warning, is there something that I need to set on my end to eliminate this?