Zulip's previous model for managing static asset files via Django
pipeline had some broken behavior around upgrades. In particular, it
was for some reason storing the information as to which static files
should be used in a memcached cache that was shared between different
deployments of Zulip. This means that during the upgrade process,
some clients might be served a version of the static assets that does
not correspond to the server they were connected to.
We've replaced that model with using ManifestStaticFilesStorage, which
instead allows each Zulip deployment directory to have its own
complete copy of the mapping of files to static assets, as it should
be.
We have to do a little bit of hackery with the staticfiles.json path
to make this work, basically because Django expects staticfiles.json
to be under STATIC_ROOT (aka the path nginx is serving to users), but
doing that doesn't really make sense for Zulip, since that directory
is shared between different deployments.
This needs to be deployed to both staging and prod at the same
off-peak time (and the schema migration run).
At the time it is deployed, we need to make a few changes directly in
the database:
(1) UPDATE django_content_type set app_label='zerver' where app_label='zephyr';
(2) UPDATE south_migrationhistory set app_name='zerver' where app_name='zephyr';
(imported from commit eb3fd719571740189514ef0b884738cb30df1320)
