I have following project structure:

project
 |
 |-templates
 |-static
    |
    |-js
    |-css
 newapp
 |
 |-static
    |
    |-js
    |-css

My settings.py sepcify:

STATIC_URL = '/static/'
STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, "static/")

Now while this works perfectly fine on development server, to make this work on deployment, I have to perform:

python manage.py collectstatic

This creates a folder called static in main project folder where manage.py resides.

My question is why there is a need to do this? Isn't there a way to serve content of those static directories in individual apps from there itself in deployment? Isnt this creating unnecessary two copies of all my static files?

Please let me know what am I missing here.