Question: I've been moving around some settings to make more defined local and production environments, and I must have messed something up. Below are the majority of relevant settings. If I move the production.py settings (which just contains AWS-related settings at the moment) to base.py, I can update S3 from my local machine just fine. Similarly, if I keep those AWS settings in base.py and push to production, S3 updates appropriately. In addition, if I print something from production.py, it does print. However, if I make production.py my "local" settings on manage.py, or when I push to Heroku with the settings as seen below, S3 is not updating.  What about my settings is incorrect? (Well, I'm sure a few things, but specifically causing S3 not to update?) Here's some relevant code: __init__.py (in the directory with base, local, and production) from cobev.settings.base import *  base.py INSTALLED_APPS = [ ... 'whitenoise.runserver_nostatic', 'django.contrib.staticfiles', ... 'storages', ] ... STATIC_URL = '/static/' STATICFILES_DIRS = [os.path.join(BASE_DIR, "global_static"), os.path.join(BASE_DIR, "media", ) ] MEDIA_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'media/') MEDIA_URL = '/media/'  local.py # local_settings.py from .base import * ... STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'staticfiles')  production.py from .base import * # AWS Settings AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID = config('AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID') AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY = config('AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY') AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME = 'cobev' AWS_S3_CUSTOM_DOMAIN = '%s.s3.amazonaws.com' % AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME AWS_S3_OBJECT_PARAMETERS = { 'CacheControl': 'max-age=86400', } AWS_LOCATION = 'static' AWS_DEFAULT_ACL = 'public-read' STATICFILES_STORAGE = 'storages.backends.s3boto3.S3Boto3Storage' DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE = 'cobev.storage_backends.MediaStorage' STATIC_URL = 'https://%s/%s/' % (AWS_S3_CUSTOM_DOMAIN, AWS_LOCATION) ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX = STATIC_URL + 'admin/' # End AWS  wsgi.py import os from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "cobev.settings.production") application = get_wsgi_application() from whitenoise.django import DjangoWhiteNoise application = DjangoWhiteNoise(application)  manage.py #!/usr/bin/env python import os import sys if __name__ == "__main__": os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "cobev.settings.local") try: from django.core.management import execute_from_command_line except ImportError as exc: raise ImportError( "Couldn't import Django. Are you sure it's installed and " "available on your PYTHONPATH environment variable? Did you " "forget to activate a virtual environment?" ) from exc execute_from_command_line(sys.argv) 

Answer: Ok, let me try, as discovered in comments from the question, you do S3 update using collectstatic, but this is a management command which is called using manage.py file where you set cobev.settings.local as settings which are not equal to cobev.settings.production which is used for wsgi.py file.  I think you should manage your settings file using, normal Django way, OS environment variable named DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE. For sure you should be able to set it in any production environment you are running.