collectstatic -- using django.conf.settings

[Aryeh Hillman]

Here is the help text for the collectstatic command:

$ ./manage.py collectstatic --help
Usage: ./manage.py collectstatic [options] 

Collect static files in a single location.

Options:
  -v VERBOSITY, --verbosity=VERBOSITY
                        Verbosity level; 0=minimal output, 1=normal output,
                        2=verbose output, 3=very verbose output
  --settings=SETTINGS   The Python path to a settings module, e.g.
                        "myproject.settings.main". If this isn't provided, the
                        DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable will be
                        used.
  --pythonpath=PYTHONPATH
                        A directory to add to the Python path, e.g.
                        "/home/djangoprojects/myproject".
  --traceback           Raise on exception
  --no-color            Don't colorize the command output.
  --noinput             Do NOT prompt the user for input of any kind.
  --no-post-process     Do NOT post process collected files.
  -i PATTERN, --ignore=PATTERN
                        Ignore files or directories matching this glob-style
                        pattern. Use multiple times to ignore more.
  -n, --dry-run         Do everything except modify the filesystem.
  -c, --clear           Clear the existing files using the storage before
                        trying to copy or link the original file.
  -l, --link            Create a symbolic link to each file instead of
                        copying.
  --no-default-ignore   Don't ignore the common private glob-style patterns
                        'CVS', '.*' and '*~'.
  --version             show program's version number and exit
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit

Clearly mentioned is a --settings flag, which takes a path to a django settings file. Supposing, however, that we want to run collectstatic from a script and want to dynamically modify our settings file. For example, something like

from django.conf import settings
from django.core.management import ManagementUtility

settings.USE_S3 = False
m = ManagementUtility(['', 'collectstatic'])
m.execute()

The command instead uses the settings specified at the shell variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE instead of the dynamic settings. Kind of pesky to have to create a separate settings file to get control of this sort of thing.

Could also be part of a larger problem -- that collectstatic cannot (easily) be used without the ManagementUtility command. For example:

from django.conf import settings
from django.core.management import ManagementUtility

m = ManagementUtility(['', 'collectstatic'])
collectstatic = m.fetch_command('collectstatic')

returns an error:

In [70]: collectstatic.collect()
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
AttributeError                            Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-70-d17fba11a87b> in <module>()
----> 1 collectstatic.collect()

/.../python2.7/site-packages/django/contrib/staticfiles/management/commands/collectstatic.pyc in collect(self)
     83         Split off from handle_noargs() to facilitate testing.
     84         """
---> 85         if self.symlink and not self.local:
     86             raise CommandError("Can't symlink to a remote destination.")
     87 

AttributeError: 'Command' object has no attribute 'symlink'