How to serve collected static files with Django's development server?

Question

I am trying to make Django's development server to serve static files that have been collected by the python manage.py collectstatic command. For now I failed.

My Django settings file declares this:

STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(WWW_PATH, 'static')
STATIC_URL = '/static/'
STATICFILES_DIRS = (
    os.path.join(ROOT_PATH, 'front', 'public'),
    os.path.join(ROOT_PATH, 'front', 'dist')
)

This makes the collectstatic command copying files from os.path.join(ROOT_PATH, 'front', 'public') and os.path.join(ROOT_PATH, 'front', 'dist') to STATIC_ROOT, and it works perfectly.

I was assuming that it would also tell Django to look for static files into the STATIC_ROOT directory, I was wrong. Even if the STATIC_ROOT directory does not exists, Django is able to serve the static files. But if the os.path.join(ROOT_PATH, 'front') is missing, Django no more serve the static files.

This shows that Django continues to serve static files from the sources directories and not from STATIC_ROOT.

So I would like to know if there is a way to instruct Django's development server to serve static files from STATIC_ROOT. Any hint?

EDIT:

After @e4c5 's answer I modified my root urls.py like this:

static_patterns = [
    url(r'^$', TemplateView.as_view(template_name='index.html'))
]

urlpatterns = [
    url(r'^', include(static_patterns)),
    url(r'^admin/', admin.site.urls),
    url(r'^api/resa/', include('reservation.urls')),
    url(r'^api/auth/', include('authentication.urls')),
] + static(settings.STATIC_URL, document_root=settings.STATIC_ROOT)

unfortunately, it does not have the expected result and Django does not find static files in STATIC_ROOT, I doubt that it actually looks for static files in STATIC_ROOT.

here is what I can see in the console when accessing to the index page:

[04/Jun/2017 16:18:05] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 1411
[04/Jun/2017 16:18:05] "GET /static/style/index.css HTTP/1.1" 404 1759
[04/Jun/2017 16:18:05] "GET /static/style/react-datetime.css HTTP/1.1" 404 1786
[04/Jun/2017 16:18:05] "GET /static/style/react-big-calendar.css HTTP/1.1" 404 1798
[04/Jun/2017 16:18:05] "GET /static/script/bundle.js HTTP/1.1" 404 1762

here are the content of the settings variables:

>>> from django.conf import settings
>>> settings.WWW_PATH
'/home/tryph/PycharmProjects/resa/www'
>>> settings.STATIC_ROOT
'/home/tryph/PycharmProjects/resa/www/static'
>>> settings.STATIC_URL
'/static/'

here is the content of the WWW_PATH directory:

/home/tryph/PycharmProjects/resa/www
└── static
    ├── admin
    │   [...]
    ├── favicon.ico
    ├── index.html
    ├── rest_framework
    │   [...]
    ├── script
    │   └── bundle.js
    └── style
        ├── index.css
        ├── react-big-calendar.css
        └── react-datetime.css

How to serve collected static files with Django's development server?

1 Answers