Django – S3 Storage Engine
by Mez on Dec.02, 2008, under Personal
After having read James Bennett‘s article on Django Media and Performance I decided that I wanted to be using S3 for storing and serving media for a new site that I’m working on (in Django)
So, it seems that it’s not that easy. I did first of all experiment with using FUSE, but decided against it.
Anyway, looking through some obscure documentation, I found that Django can use custom storage methods. So, I thought I’d write one.
You can find the file here
The code requires you to have Amazon’s S3 API installed.
So, how do you use it? It’s pretty simple really. First of all – you need to setup your configuration – so edit settings.py and add the following (changing the values to suit your needs!)
S3_SETTINGS = {
'aws_key': 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX',
'aws_secret_key': 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX',
'bucket': 'bucket_name',
'default_perm': 'public-read',
'vanity_url': False
}
The settings should be self-explanatory – apart from ‘vanity_url’. S3 allows you to CNAME a domain name to a bucket with a similar name – for example, I could CNAME files.sourceguru.net to files.sourceguru.net.s3.amazonaws.com and it would allow me to serve information from that bucket as if they were coming from my own domain. (infact, I’m tempted to do this – I’ve too much stuff in my files section!) – the vanity_url – when set to True – will use the bucketname as the domain instead of <bucketname>.s3.amazonaws.com.
Now, to use it in a model, it’s as simple as adding an import line at the top of the models file
from site.app.s3storage import S3Storage
and then, in your model
class Item(models.Model): storage = S3Storage() image = models.ImageField(upload_to='path', storage=storage)
Pretty simple, 
Hope this helps some people out there!
5 Comments for this entry
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Great Little Helpers For Django Devs • Blog Archive • Lonely Code
October 20th, 2009 on 12:46 pm[...] 4. Django S3 Storage Engine [...]
December 27th, 2008 on 4:03 pm
hey,
i was just setting out to do the same thing when i saw your code. would you mind if i put it up on gist (http://gist.github.com)? it will be easier for others to pull it down and use it then.
thanks,
jeff
December 27th, 2008 on 6:12 pm
er, go for it
I’ve not really any idea why that makes it easier 
March 6th, 2010 on 7:34 pm
Thanks for your article. I am new at django and this is a big help.
June 14th, 2010 on 7:47 am
little oopsie in your code resulting in an infinite loop:
while self.exists(filename):
filename = ‘%s-%d%s’ % (basefilename[0], i, basefilename[1])
you need to increment i in that loop.
January 28th, 2011 on 11:20 am
Is this storage compatible with Django 1.2.* Are there changes to make?
Thanks in advice, Stefan