makemessages only looks in the current folder

[Eduard Luca]

When running django-admin.py makemessages (with the appropriate arguments), it doesn't generate po files for Javascript files which use gettext. As far as I can tell, it's because in core/management/commands/makemessages.py at line 304, there's file_list = self.find_files("."), which means it only looks in the current directory (and subdirs), meaning it won't ever look in either STATIC_ROOT or STATICFILES_DIRS (still a bit fuzzy which one is which).

Unless there's an obvious thing I'm missing here, I'd treat this as either one of the following:

• a bug, because it should look in JS files too
• a feature request to add a --lookup_path argument

The current workaround is to run manage.py from whatever folder you want it to look in.

[Claude Paroz]

If your STATIC_ROOT setting is pointing to some files actually in your source tree, you're doing it wrong, see #23583.
Now if the above doesn't explain your issue entirely, could you please make a sample project where we could reproduce the problem?

[Eduard Luca]

I did see that issue, and corrected my mistake, however the result was still the same. I also printed self.ignore_patterns and it doesn't contain the folder with my static files.

I still believe it's to do with the line I originally posted, but I will try to create a minimal sample project with this issue and re-open.