Reduce the Slug Size on Heroku

[UPstartDeveloper]

Hey all,

The Carbon0 team recently surpassed Heroku's soft limit on the size of our slug. Would any one have recommendations on how to decrease it?

[UPstartDeveloper]

Hey team, so we've progressed on here by adding the .slugignore file to the repo:

# GitHub stuff
.github/

# Static files 
static/images/
static/assets/
staticfiles/

# React JS stuff
package.json
package-lock.json
webpack.config.js
react_files/
react_leaderboard/

# Docker containers
Docker*
.dockerignore
nginx/
postgres/
entrypoint.sh

The question now is if it's really a good idea to ignore the staticfiles/staticfiles.json file from the Heroku slug? I tried doing that, and the server threw an error on loading the main page (which uses static images):

ValueError
Missing staticfiles manifest entry for 'images/background_2.png'

Does anyone have a good understanding of the above error, and how staticfiles.json plays a role in storing the images on our site?

I was under the impression since we have an AWS S3 bucket already storing all the files, that it would be okay to not push any local static files to Heroku. But definitely open to hearing other ideas!