Configuring Django/Wagtail media to use S3

Question

I'm using the following guide:

https://www.caktusgroup.com/blog/2014/11/10/Using-Amazon-S3-to-store-your-Django-sites-static-and-media-files/

At the section that instructs you on how to "Configuring Django media to use S3". I'm using this for Wagtail.

I'm unclear on where to put the "custom_storages.py" settings. Everywhere I'm putting it doesn't seem to work. I reverted back to Whitenoise for now.

Thanks!

• FlipperPA: Just some advice; I followed the same tutorial and have it working, however, the django-storages project is not being actively maintained. I found a bug and issued a PR, but it hasn't been merged or commented on, and it has been quite a few months. Since I was only using S3 and didn't need the other storage types, I switched to using django-s3-storage, which simplifies things significantly and is well documented. You can find it here: github.com/etianen/django-s3-storage
• dentemm: @FlipperPA Django-storages is actively maintained, if you look at the commit history you will see updates on an almost daily basis.
• FlipperPA: @dentemm A fair point, I hadn't checked in a bit. But this PR is a fairly major bug fix that has been sitting for a while: github.com/jschneier/django-storages/pull/233 In regards to Wagtail, this causes any user uploaded images / documents in Wagtail to choke since size should be used instead of content_length.

Answer 1

You can put custom_storages.py anywhere on your Python path. Django will try to find the class using the value of the STATICFILES_STORAGE setting, which in the example is 'custom_storages.StaticStorage'. So Django will, in effect "import custom_storages" and use "custom_storages.StaticStorage" as the storage class. Just make sure you can "import custom_storages" and it should work.

• emTr0: Thanks but can you be a bit more detailed/specific. I'm learning as I go.
• Dan Poirier: Check out how Python finds imported files in your favorite Python reference, and hopefully things will become clear.
• emTr0: For the purposes of settings the path, should I rename the file to not include the .py extension? So it's /x/x/custom_storages. I found this as a guide stackoverflow.com/questions/15109548/…

Answer 2

You need to set the STATICFILES_STORAGE setting

STATICFILES_STORAGE = 'path/to/custom_storages.StaticStorage'

If you are using wagtail (which I assume you do since you are tagging this question with it), you can place it in the default home/ directory and refer to it like so: 'home/custom_storages.StaticStorage'

The content of custom_storages.py are stated in the guide you are following:

# custom_storages.py
from django.conf import settings
from storages.backends.s3boto import S3BotoStorage
class StaticStorage(S3BotoStorage):
 location = settings.STATICFILES_LOCATION

Edit: I have a GitHub repo (also a wagtail project) in which I am using this code, but only for my media files. You can check it here.

• emTr0: Thanks you! This helped.