Django 5.1+ removes STATICFILES_STORAGE in favour of the STORAGES dict.
The old setting was silently ignored on Django 5.2, causing StaticFilesStorage
(the default) to be used instead of CompressedManifestStaticFilesStorage.
Result: no content-hashed filenames, no staticfiles.json manifest, and
Cloudflare caching /static/css/styles.css indefinitely with no cache
busting on deploy.
Fix: use STORAGES in base.py (CompressedManifestStaticFilesStorage) and
development.py (plain StaticFilesStorage, whitenoise disabled in dev).
Co-authored-by: Copilot <223556219+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com>
- Remove WhiteNoise from MIDDLEWARE in development: it intercepts /static/
requests and serves from STATIC_ROOT, which is empty without collectstatic.
Django's runserver serves static files natively with DEBUG=True.
- Switch to StaticFilesStorage in dev: no manifest required.
- Add media URL pattern in DEBUG mode: runserver does not serve MEDIA_ROOT
automatically, so uploaded images were 404ing in local dev.
Co-authored-by: Copilot <223556219+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com>
CompressedManifestStaticFilesStorage requires collectstatic to generate a
manifest before it can serve anything. Dev containers never run collectstatic
so every static asset 404s. Override to StaticFilesStorage in dev so Django
serves files directly from STATICFILES_DIRS and app static directories.
Co-authored-by: Copilot <223556219+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com>
