What is the best way to get past the "manage.py collectstatic" in django-ckeditor setup?

Question

On https://github.com/shaunsephton/django-ckeditor, the set of instructions to set up django-ckeditor includes:

4. Run the collectstatic management command:

$ ./manage.py collectstatic

This'll copy static CKEditor require media resources into the directory given by the STATIC_ROOT setting. See Django's documentation on managing static files for more info.

However, when I try to do so, I get an error:

$ python manage.py collectstatic
/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/django/conf/__init__.py:221: DeprecationWarning: You have no filters defined on the 'mail_admins' logging handler: adding implicit debug-false-only filter. See http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.4/#request-exceptions-are-now-always-logged
  DeprecationWarning)


You have requested to collect static files at the destination
location as specified in your settings.

This will overwrite existing files!
Are you sure you want to do this?

Type 'yes' to continue, or 'no' to cancel: yes
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 12: ordinal not in range(128)

How can I best address things so that django-ckeditor has the static files it wants?

In settings.py, I now have:

DIRNAME = os.path.dirname(__file__)

STATIC_ROOT = DIRNAME + '/static/'
print STATIC_ROOT

From the shell:

You are in a maze of twisted little Infocom parodies, all alike.
~/ccachicago > python manage.py collectstatic
/home/jonathan/ccachicago/static/
/home/jonathan/ccachicago/../ccachicago/static/
/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/django/conf/__init__.py:221: DeprecationWarning: You have no filters defined on the 'mail_admins' logging handler: adding implicit debug-false-only filter. See http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.4/#request-exceptions-are-now-always-logged
      DeprecationWarning)


You have requested to collect static files at the destination
location as specified in your settings.

This will overwrite existing files!
Are you sure you want to do this?

Type 'yes' to continue, or 'no' to cancel: yes
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 12: ordinal not in range(128)

You are in a maze of twisted little Infocom parodies, all alike.
~/ccachicago >

I'm wary of saying, "I couldn't do that," but I grew up on Unix and would only use traditional Unix filename characters on this Ubuntu server.

I don't see why I would have provided any characters not traditionally part of Unix filenames, and it seems to be reporting only traditional Unix filenames.

Are there other ways it could be tripping over non-ASCII characters? Let's assume that I have used only ASCII characters in all the places Unix wouldn't get along with smartquotes, accented characters, etc.

Answer 1

Looks like you have a path/file in the static files of your django project that has a non-ascii filename. You will have to take a look at your static files and root out the cause. I dont think there is anyway to actually produce the list of static files(like using the --dry-run option on collectstatic) without causing that error.

Answer 2

See: https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/20375

The issue is unicode data INSIDE one of your files... not a file name. As noted in the ticket, wrapping the line at: https://github.com/django/django/blob/1.4/django/contrib/staticfiles/storage.py#L172 with a str() corrects the issue and allows collectstatic to complete.