django's collectstatic collects into unexpected directory - django

Question

I want to upload my staticfiles to amazon s3 storage, but I can't stop django from just putting them in a directory staticfiles in the project root. I have boto3 in my requirements.txt and have set
STATICFILES_STORAGE = 'storages.backends.s3boto3.S3Boto3Storage'
I have successfully set up s3 with media files, to the same bucket (under different directory).
Collectstatic also seems disregards the STATIC_ROOT variable in settings.py when I comment out the s3-settings. When running python3 manage.py collectstatic I expect it to gather static files into STATIC_ROOT as it says in the docs here https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.1/ref/settings/ (under static_root). But even if I give a different value to STATIC_ROOT, collectstatic always collects into a directory on the root called staticfiles.
STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'this_is_not_used_by_collectstatic')
The rest of my s3 settings:
# Amazon S3
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID = os.environ['AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID']
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY = os.environ['AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY']
AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME = 'my_bucket_name'
AWS_S3_REGION_NAME = 'eu-north-1'
AWS_S3_CUSTOM_DOMAIN = '%s.s3.amazonaws.com' % AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME
AWS_S3_OBJECT_PARAMETERS = {
'CacheControl': 'max-age=86400',
}
AWS_DEFAULT_ACL = None
AWS_LOCATION = 'static'
STATIC_URL = 'https://%s/%s/' % (AWS_S3_CUSTOM_DOMAIN, AWS_LOCATION)
STATICFILES_STORAGE = 'storages.backends.s3boto3.S3Boto3Storage'
# media
DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE = 'korvir.storage_backends.MediaStorage'

Answer 1

If you're using django-heroku and and you have the following in your code, as per the instructions:
django_heroku.settings(locals())
... then it will overwrite your STATIC_ROOT setting. If you want to preserve your own STATIC_ROOT setting, then make sure you set STATIC_ROOT after calling django_heroku.settings.