collectstatic post-processing fails for references inside comments

[shreyas@…]

"python manage.py collectstatic" is attempting to parse references inside css comments and generating errors during post-processing. I am using:
STATICFILES_STORAGE = 'django.contrib.staticfiles.storage.CachedStaticFilesStorage'

eg.
The following snippet of code in test.css:

.gfg-collapse-closed {
  /* background-image : url('arrow_close.gif'); */
}

produces the following error:

ValueError: The file 'stylesheets/arrow_close.gif' could not be found with <django.contrib.staticfiles.storage.CachedStaticFilesStorage object at 0x1078a3910>.
collectstatic

Ideally, collectstatic should respect CSS comments and should not attempt to parse/reference files in lines that are commented out.

If the fix is too complex, a simple workaround might be to include a --ignore-error flag that would allow the application to continue post-processing even when it sees errors

[Kevin Christopher Henry]

CachedFilesMixin is using simple ​regular expressions to match url and @import statements, and so is picking up the ones inside comments. It would also have a problem if the text was inside a string.

If it's possible to rewrite the regex to cover all the corner cases, that would be the easy fix. But I doubt it. The robust way would be to parse the css files properly, but that would mean rewriting a lot of code...

[anonymous]

Could you recommend a path forward? Can we at least have it skip failed imports with a warning rather than break?

-Shreyas

[Pablo SEMINARIO]

I'm agree with the comment of @marfire, the correct way to do this is with a CSS parser, because there are many cases to be treated (multi-line comments, nested comments, broken comments, etc.)

Adding an option to skip failed imports was reported in ticket:19650 and it was marked as a duplicated of ticket:18958.

If you really need ignore these errors, you can create a subclass of CachedFilesMixin on your own project and add a try...except statement to handle these kind of exceptions.

[German Larrain]

This bit me today. "Dumb" workaround: replace that url in your comments with u r l.

[Ben Spaulding]

Just as an additional datapoint and another thing to consider if it comes to parsing the CSS, I recently started working on a project where the designers used some CSS expressions for an IE-specific stylesheet. The JScript used in one expression puts a particularly crazy bit like .replace('url("','').replace('")',''). As marfire said, that url bit in a string raises an exception. Fortunately I can overcome this for my project with a simple sublcass to make a very small change to the regular expression used. But that is one other thing to consider if it is decided that the CachedStaticFilesStorage needs to be more robust.

[Udo Schochtert]

hi, apparently this issue is still open in django 1.11.

my deploy to heroku failed with the following error log:

...
    $ python manage.py collectstatic --noinput
       Post-processing 'jquery-ui-dist/jquery-ui.theme.css' failed!
       Traceback (most recent call last):
         File "manage.py", line 10, in <module>
           execute_from_command_line(sys.argv)
         File "/app/.heroku/python/lib/python3.6/site-packages/django/core/management/__init__.py", line 364, in execute_from_command_line
           utility.execute()
         File "/app/.heroku/python/lib/python3.6/site-packages/django/core/management/__init__.py", line 356, in execute
           self.fetch_command(subcommand).run_from_argv(self.argv)
         File "/app/.heroku/python/lib/python3.6/site-packages/django/core/management/base.py", line 283, in run_from_argv
           self.execute(*args, **cmd_options)
         File "/app/.heroku/python/lib/python3.6/site-packages/django/core/management/base.py", line 330, in execute
           output = self.handle(*args, **options)
         File "/app/.heroku/python/lib/python3.6/site-packages/django/contrib/staticfiles/management/commands/collectstatic.py", line 199, in handle
           collected = self.collect()
         File "/app/.heroku/python/lib/python3.6/site-packages/django/contrib/staticfiles/management/commands/collectstatic.py", line 145, in collect
           raise processed
       whitenoise.storage.MissingFileError: The file 'jquery-ui-dist/"images/ui-icons_555555_256x240.png"' could not be found with <whitenoise.storage.CompressedManifestStaticFilesStorage object at 0x7ff880f551d0>.
       The CSS file 'jquery-ui-dist/jquery-ui.theme.css' references a file which could not be found:
         jquery-ui-dist/"images/ui-icons_555555_256x240.png"
       Please check the URL references in this CSS file, particularly any
       relative paths which might be pointing to the wrong location.
 !     Error while running '$ python manage.py collectstatic --noinput'.
       See traceback above for details.
       You may need to update application code to resolve this error.
       Or, you can disable collectstatic for this application:
          $ heroku config:set DISABLE_COLLECTSTATIC=1
       https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/django-assets
 !     Push rejected, failed to compile Python app.
 !     Push failed

the "collectstatic" command fails here:
... The file 'jquery-ui-dist/"images/ui-icons_555555_256x240.png"' could not be found with ...
because it tries to parse js comments.

The file path should be

• jquery-ui-dist/images/ui-icons_555555_256x240.png

and not

• jquery-ui-dist/"images/ui-icons_555555_256x240.png"

other people on stackoverflow run inmto this issue as well:

• ​https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41772144/bad-filename-formed-by-collectstatic-from-jquery-ui-1-12-0-min-css
• ​https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40010040/django-pipeline-throwing-valueerror-the-file-could-not-be-found

would be great if this issue could be fixed. thanks ;)

[powderflask]

Re: comment:6 is a slightly different issue and MUCH easier to patch.

This issue is caused by generators (like ​http://jqueryui.com/themeroller) that urlencode stuff in a comment block.
E.g.

/*! jQuery UI - v1.12.1 - 2016-09-14
  * http://jqueryui.com
  * Includes: core.css, accordion.css, ...
  * To view and modify this theme, visit http://jqueryui.com/themeroller/?...&iconsHover=url(%22images%2Fui-icons_555555_256x240.png%22)...
  * Copyright jQuery Foundation and other contributors; Licensed MIT */

The regular expression in storage.HashedFilesMixin matches url(...) in the comment, but it does NOT unquote the urlencoded quotation mark: %22
The last step of converter() unquotes the transformed url: return template % unquote(transformed_url), converting the urlencoded quotation marks back, and thus messing up the filename, as can be seen in the posted stack trace:

    The file 'jquery-ui-dist/"images/ui-icons_555555_256x240.png"' could not be found...

(Notice the excess quotation marks in the path.)

Patch:

storage.py line 61
- r"""(url\(['"]{0,1}\s*(.*?)["']{0,1}\))""",
+ r"""(url\((?:['"]|%22|%27){0,1}\s*(.*?)(?:['"]|%22|%27){0,1}\))""",

This matches url encoded single- or double-quotes and fixed several such issues with 3rd party packages that included generated CSS files like this.

IF a general fix for ignoring comments in CSS files is implemented, that would resolve this issue too.
But IF NOT, this is a simple fix that prevents collectstatic from crashing on common 3rd party packages.

Happy to submit a patch for this if this seems worthwhile.

[Claude Paroz]

As long as we are using regular expressions, excluding comment contents seems out of question. So your patch might be worthfile in the short term.
A proper resolution of this ticket would be to use a JS parser to get links. This will be much more invasive though.

[powderflask]

Replying to powderflask:
If you need to resolve this issue in the interim, override ManifestStaticFilesStorage (or CachedStaticFilesStorage) and re-define the class patterns property:

from django.contrib.staticfiles import storage

class PatchedManifestStaticFilesStorage(storage.ManifestStaticFilesStorage):
    """
    Override the replacement patterns to match URL-encoded quotations.
    """
    patterns = (
        ("*.css", (
            r"""(url\((?:['"]|%22|%27){0,1}\s*(.*?)(?:['"]|%22|%27){0,1}\))""",
            (r"""(@import\s*["']\s*(.*?)["'])""", """@import url("%s")"""),
        )),
    )