Django. Alternate between local & remote staticfiles - django

Question

After collecting my staticfiles and storing them in an Amazon Bucket (AWS S3), when I run the project locally it still uses the staticfiles stored online, this is a problem cause when I want to make a change on a css file for ex, I have to run collectstatic or manually upload the file to Amazon. I tried adding a new setting variable "LOCAL_STATICFILES" like this:
settings.py
LOCAL_STATICFILES = False
if not LOCAL_STATICFILES:
DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE = 'storages.backends.s3boto.S3BotoStorage'
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID = os.environ['AWSAccessKeyId']
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY = os.environ['AWSSecretKey']
AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME = os.environ['AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME']
S3_URL = 'http://%s.s3.amazonaws.com/' % AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME
STATIC_URL = S3_URL
STATICFILES_STORAGE = 'storages.backends.s3boto.S3BotoStorage'
if LOCAL_STATICFILES:
STATIC_URL = '/static/'
STATIC_ROOT = '/'
But when I turn LOCAL_STATICFILES to True and runserver, django can't find them.
The project's folders look like this:
project
app
app
static
css
js
img
templates
What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

First of all: Ensure you have a way to distinguish whether you are, or not, in an environment supporting the Amazon bucket configuration. This means, usually this will be your production environment, where you already configured the amazon bucket settings.
So you will:
BASE_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(__file__))
# this is the base project path
if 'AWSAccessKeyId' in os.environ:
# assume the presence of this key will determine whether
# we are, or not, in the bucket-supporting environment
DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE = 'storages.backends.s3boto.S3BotoStorage'
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID = os.environ['AWSAccessKeyId']
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY = os.environ['AWSSecretKey']
AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME = os.environ['AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME']
STATIC_URL = 'http://%s.s3.amazonaws.com/' % AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME
# static url will be the re
STATIC_ROOT = None
# STATIC_ROOT doesn't matter since you will not invoke
# `manage.py collectstatic` from this environment. You
# can safely let it to None, or anything like:
# os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'static')
else:
STATIC_URL = '/static/'
# the static files url will point to your local,
# development, server
STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'static')
# here, STATIC_ROOT matters, since you will invoke
# `manage.py collectstatic` from your local environment.