Django Collectstatic Gotchas

Overall the Django staticfiles app is great. But I ran into one behavior I did not expect that caused some problems.

As noted in the documentation:

 The default is to look in all locations defined in STATICFILES_DIRS and in the 'static' directory of apps specified by the INSTALLED_APPS setting

and:

Duplicate file names are by default resolved in a similar way to how template resolution works: the file that is first found in one of the specified locations will be used.

To make my apps more modular, I put a static directory in each. Each containing among other things a css folder. Unfortunately for me, I used the same name for some css files in different apps. Thus the first one found made it into collectedstatic and the other one did not. This was not what I was expecting.

To solve the problem, I set

STATICFILES_FINDERS = ( "django.contrib.staticfiles.finders.FileSystemFinder", )

And I added my apps to STATICFILES_DIRS like this:

STATICFILES_DIRS=[('my_django',os.path.join(MY_DJANGO_PATH,'static')),
('app1',os.path.join(MY_DJANGO_PATH,'app1','static')),
('app2',os.path.join(MY_DJANGO_PATH,'app2','static')))

Now collected static made a folder for each app.