I ran into very weird issue for which I could not find a reason. I have a django app with uWSGI as my app server and Nginx as our reverse proxy. My initial setting for the static url in Django are as below:

```
PROJECT_DIR = "/home/ubuntu/src/myapp"

MEDIA_ROOT = os.path.join(PROJECT_DIR, 'media')
MEDIA_URL = '/media/'
STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(PROJECT_DIR, 'staticfiles')
STATIC_URL = '/staticfiles/'

STATICFILES_DIRS = (
    os.path.join(PROJECT_DIR, 'static'),
)

```

and what's there in the nginx conf is as below: 

```
server {
    listen      80;
    server_name  stg1.myapp.com

    client_max_body_size 5G;   # adjust to taste

    access_log /var/log/nginx/myapp-access.log combined;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/myapp-error.log;

    location /media  {
        alias /home/ubuntu/src/myapp/media/;  # your Django project's media files - amend as required
    }

    location /static {
        alias /home/ubuntu/src/myapp/staticfiles/;
    }
    location / {
        uwsgi_pass  django;
        uwsgi_read_timeout 600s;
        uwsgi_buffering off;
        uwsgi_send_timeout 600s;
        proxy_read_timeout 600s;
        include /home/ubuntu/src/myapp/uwsgi_params;

    }
}

```

Now, when I was trying to access the server I was getting this error for the static files: 

```
2016/12/13 20:33:03 [error] 30533#0: *194 open() "/home/ubuntu/src/myapp/staticfiles/files/css/base.css" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 172.31.4.166, server: stg.myapp.com, request: "GET /staticfiles/css/base.css HTTP/1.1", host: "stg.myapp.com", referrer: "http://stg.myapp.com/profile/user1"

```

`Collectstatic` copied all the files in the given `STATIC_ROOT` location. But the path actually searched was - `STATIC_ROOT/files`.

When I changed the `STATIC_ROOT` to 

```
STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(PROJECT_DIR, 'staticfiles/files')

```

it worked. I am still clueless about why the directory `staticfiles/files` was being looked for and not just the `staticfiles` directory as given in nginx conf. Where should I be looking for a possible reason?

**EDIT** - I had restarted nginx service whenever there was a change done there. So no issues there.