collectstatic does not work with zipped (egg) packages

[minder]

I installed django-select2 which worked perfectly in my test venvironment. But during deployment, when I ran ./manage.py collectstatic, required files were not copied. It turned out that the package was installed as egg.

I couldn't find a topic about this problem except ​this ticket on django-dajax. This issue is present in currently stable Django (1.6.5).

The only solution by now is to reinstall the package manually enforcing unzipped installation.

[Aymeric Augustin]

These days, Django doesn't attempt to support apps installed as eggs.

There's a template loader that you can enable to load templates from egg files. It was added long ago and I don't think we'd add it today if it weren't already there.

It's certainly possible to write a static files storage class that loads static files from eggs. You can do it outside of Django.

I'm going to ask the author of the staticfiles contrib app, who also knows a lot about packaging, if he believes this belongs to Django.

(Note that Django will still fail to load translations from apps installed as eggs, and that one is much more difficult to fix.)

[Aymeric Augustin]

Jannis says he had implemented such a finder with pkg_resources but he chose not to include it in Django. He thinks this is a duplicate of another ticket (but I haven't searched).