Why does DEBUG=False setting make my django Static Files Access fail?

With debug turned off Django won't handle static files for you any more - your production web server (Apache or something) should take care of that.

If you still need to server static locally (e.g. for testing without debug) you can run devserver in insecure mode:

manage.py runserver --insecure

You can use WhiteNoise to serve static files in production.

Install:

pip install WhiteNoise==2.0.6

And change your wsgi.py file to this:

from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application
from whitenoise.django import DjangoWhiteNoise

application = get_wsgi_application()
application = DjangoWhiteNoise(application)

And you're good to go!

Credit to Handlebar Creative Blog.

BUT, it's really not recommended serving static files this way in production. Your production web server(like nginx) should take care of that.

In urls.py I added this line:

from django.views.static import serve 

add those two urls in urlpatterns:

url(r'^media/(?P<path>.*)$', serve,{'document_root': settings.MEDIA_ROOT}), 
url(r'^static/(?P<path>.*)$', serve,{'document_root': settings.STATIC_ROOT}), 

and both static and media files were accesible when DEBUG=FALSE.
Hope it helps :)