Pretty self-explanatory. #22, #52 and #64 are related. If you're using staticfiles with the STATICFILES_DIRS setting, but are not using STATIC_ROOT, an error is raised when trying to make absolute paths for the static files. In our case, we use staticfiles in development and use a separate storage class for S3 storage of our static files. This means STATIC_ROOT is never set for us, neither in development nor in production. But, because of the has_scheme check in make_absolute_paths this luckily shouldn't be a problem in production, only in development.