Magento 2.1.5 – Fixing Missing Version Folder During Static Content Deploy

I reckon there's several types of errors that can be triggered by the deployment.

First you can see that Exception are handled directly in the execution in Magento/Deploy/Console/Command/DeployStaticContentCommand.php:

    catch (\Exception $e) {
        $output->writeln('<error>' . $e->getMessage() . '</error>>');
        if ($output->getVerbosity() >= OutputInterface::VERBOSITY_VERBOSE) {
            $output->writeln($e->getTraceAsString());
        }
        return;
    }

Regarding the errors that are counted it's a totally different system, you need to look into the Magento/Deploy/Model/Deployer class, the output you got is written by the deploy() method:

$this->output->writeln("\nSuccessful: {$this->count} files; errors: {$this->errorCount}\n---\n");

Now if we check when this errorCount variable is incremented, we find the following in the deployFile() method:

    catch (\Exception $exception) {
        $this->output->write('.');
        $this->verboseLog($exception->getTraceAsString());
        $this->errorCount++;
    }

And as you may have already guessed, the verboseLog() method only outputs when the command is run on verbose mode:

private function verboseLog($message)
{
    if ($this->output->isVerbose()) {
        $this->output->writeln($message);
    }
}

So I reckon you need to run your command like this to see the errors:

php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy -v

If it doesn't work try the extra verboses:

php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy -vv
php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy -vvv

According to this Magento 2 Github issue the functionality for this has not yet been implemented although they are in discussions about adding it.

As a workaround you can apparently delete and uninstall the luma theme (see instructions in my quote below) from the vendor directory and it will skip it. You may need to clear var/view_preprocessed, pub/static, and clear you caches for it to work though.

Comment from Alan Kent is on that github issue:

(If you want a short term hack, you can delete the Luma theme directory under 'vendor' so Magento does not see it any more. Make sure you run the CLI to uninstall the theme as well so it disappears from database etc. http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.0/install-gde/install/cli/install-cli-theme-uninstall.html. Yes, we need a better solution, but it may remove some immediate pain.)