"No matching file found…" when PIPELINE_ENABLED = True and DEBUG = True

I’m not sure if this is a bug or intended behavior but I couldn’t find anything that specifically answered this question. I’m trying to serve the compiled staticfiles through runserver for debugging. When DEBUG = True and PIPELINE_ENABLED is its default value, I can run ./manage.py findstatic css/generated.css and it will return the correct path.

However, if I override PIPELINE_ENABLED to be True and then run ./manage.py findstatic css/generated.css it returns:

No matching file found for 'css/generated.css'.

Is this intended? It would be great to be able to test compression inside of runserver.

[john-clarke]

I’m having the same issue outlined in the original post. When I’m in DEBUG=True I sometimes want to have pipeline serve compiled/concatenated assets. If I override the PIPELINE_ENABLED=True the compiled assets are properly referenced the response, but server returns a 404 error for those assets.

If DEBUG=False and I have previously run collectstatic I have no problems (compiled versions are generated and served). If I don’t override the PIPELINE_ENABLED, I also have no problems – but individual source files are served rather than the compiled version.

django-pipeline=1.6.12

[harmon]

There was a change in the Compiler that now (as of 1.4.0) uses the storage to look up the input file before processing, instead of the finder. This means that the input will need to come from the STATIC_ROOT end result of running collectstatic, and not from the STATICFILES_DIRS, where the source files come from: https://github.com/jazzband/django-pipeline/commit/bd6b9d8966a5e00701d3a803c4977f20df7a282d#diff-54b8c27056913aafe149e01ff0aa5e46L35

After this change, it basically requires that the files first are copied into STATIC_ROOT, whereas before they could just be sourced from the original directories. The only way I can get DEBUG=True to work without first running collectstatic is like this:

DEBUG = True
PIPELINE = {
    ''PIPELINE_ENABLED": False,
    "PIPELINE_COLLECTOR_ENABLED": True
}

It seems like this change in 1.4x made it required in development to copy all files into the STATIC_ROOT on each request, which adds a huge penalty. I wish it would just load out of the source folders like in 1.3.

Another thing, is that if PIPELINE_ENABLED = True, it expects STATIC_ROOT to have files. When it’s turned off, but you have PIPELINE_COLLECTOR_ENABLED = True, it will generate the STATIC_ROOT for you, so that’s why it works. But setting PIPELINE_ENABLED = True skips the check for PIPELINE_COLLECTOR_ENABLED, so it can’t generate the STATIC_ROOT on the fly.

See:

https://github.com/jazzband/django-pipeline/blob/master/pipeline/templatetags/pipeline.py#L67-L72

And:

https://github.com/jazzband/django-pipeline/blob/master/pipeline/templatetags/pipeline.py#L97-L98