Collectstatic raises error when trying to ignore files with glob wildcards

[Daniel Wiesmann]

I got an unexpected error when trying to ignore a file pattern in subdirectories when using the collectstatic command. Here is an example that reproduces the error in a new project:

cd /tmp && django-admin.py startproject proj
echo "STATIC_ROOT = '/tmp/staticroot'" >> /tmp/proj/proj/settings.py
echo "STATICFILES_DIRS = ('/tmp/proj/static', )" >> /tmp/proj/proj/settings.py

mkdir -p /tmp/proj/static/vendor/lib

touch /tmp/proj/static/vendor/lib/module1.js
touch /tmp/proj/static/vendor/lib/moudle2.js
touch /tmp/proj/static/vendor/lib/moudle3.js
touch /tmp/proj/static/vendor/lib/moudle4.js

/tmp/proj/manage.py collectstatic --no-input -i **/vendor/**/*.js

The first time running the collectstatic command, it gives no error but collects the js files in /static/vendor/lib, the second time running this command gives the follwoing error message:

$ /tmp/proj/manage.py collectstatic --no-input -i **/vendor/**/*.js

usage: manage.py collectstatic [-h] [--version] [-v {0,1,2,3}]
                               [--settings SETTINGS] [--pythonpath PYTHONPATH]
                               [--traceback] [--no-color] [--noinput]
                               [--no-post-process] [-i PATTERN] [-n] [-c] [-l]
                               [--no-default-ignore]
manage.py collectstatic: error: unrecognized arguments: staticroot/vendor/lib/moudle2.js staticroot/vendor/lib/moudle3.js staticroot/vendor/lib/moudle4.js

[shangdahao]

I got the errors the first time running the commands above.

[Tim Graham]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think your shell is expanding **/vendor/**/*.js and then passing those arguments to Django. Quote the pattern, i.e. -i '**/vendor/**/*.js' to avoid that.

[Daniel Wiesmann]

You were right, the error came from the shell expansion. I had tried the quoted version before, but it did not result in any matching, that is why I got confused.

After looking into the details of collectstatic, I saw that the patterns were not matched against the full file paths. So the above statement would never find a match. I made a small pull request to allow for this kind of matching and added a reference to the fnmatch library to the docs, so that its easier to understand how the matching is done (since its not using glob directly).

​https://github.com/django/django/pull/9021

See also https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/28566