Serving static files during development without relying on django.contrib.staticfiles

Question

I'm trying to keep my front and back ends completely separate. Front end is a template developed in node-land with (I hope) minimal or no context involvement, back-end is a set of TemplateViews and an API.

I'm building my frontend to my frontend directory, so that's easy enough, I just set in settings.py :

TEMPLATES = [
    {
        "DIRS": ["frontend/"]
    ...

I'm running into difficulties when these templates reference assets like:

<link rel="assets/css/foobar.css" />

foobar.css is present at the relevant location, but the dev server doesn't know to look there. Obviously in production the proxy server will be serving these files directly, but can I get the django dev server to do that while I'm developing? I really want to avoid prefixing with {{ STATIC_URL }} and other template tags that couple the back end to the templates.

Answer 1

Figured it out: Have a separate dev settings file that overrides:

STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'frontend/build/assets/')
STATIC_URL = 'assets/'

Now the dev server will be able to look in the correct location without relying on {% static %} tags.