How to set-up a Django project with django-storages and Amazon S3, but with different folders for static files and media files?

Question

I\'m configuring a Django project that were using the server filesystem for storing the apps static files (STATIC_ROOT) and user uploaded files (MEDIA_ROO

Answer 1

I think the answer is pretty simple and done by default. This is working for me on AWS Elastic Beanstalk with Django 1.6.5 and Boto 2.28.0:

STATICFILES_FINDERS = (
    'django.contrib.staticfiles.finders.FileSystemFinder',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles.finders.AppDirectoriesFinder',
)

TEMPLATE_LOADERS = (
    'django.template.loaders.filesystem.Loader',
    'django.template.loaders.app_directories.Loader',
)

DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE = 'storages.backends.s3boto.S3BotoStorage'
STATICFILES_STORAGE = 'storages.backends.s3boto.S3BotoStorage'
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID = os.environ['AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID']
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY = os.environ['AWS_SECRET_KEY']

The AWS keys are passed in from the container config file and I have no STATIC_ROOT or STATIC_URL set at all. Also, no need for the s3utils.py file. These details are handled by the storage system automatically. The trick here is that I needed to reference this unknown path in my templates correctly and dynamically. For example:

That is how I address my favicon which lives locally (pre-deployment) in ~/Projects/my_app/project/my_app/static/img/favicon.ico.

Of course I have a separate local_settings.py file for accessing this stuff locally in dev environment and it does have STATIC and MEDIA settings. I had to do a lot of experimenting and reading to find this solution and it works consistently with no errors.

I understand that you need the static and root separation and considering that you can only provide one bucket I would point out that this method takes all the folders in my local environment under ~/Projects/my_app/project/my_app/static/and creates a folder in the bucket root (ie: S3bucket/img/ as in the example above). So you do get separation of files. For example you could have a media folder in the static folder and access it via templating with this:

{% static "media/" %}

I hope this helps. I came here looking for the answer and pushed a bit harder to find a simpler solution than to extend the storage system. Instead, I read the documentation about the intended use of Boto and I found that a lot of what I needed was built-in by default. Cheers!