Django Storages

Introduction to Django-storages

Django-storages is a third-party package that provides a flexible file storage backend for Django. It allows you to use different storage backends, such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Microsoft Azure, to handle and manage files and images uploaded by users.

One of the main features of Django storage is its ability to abstract the details of the storage backend from the application code so that you can easily switch between different storage options without changing your application code. This makes it easy to use Django storage in a variety of deployment environments, such as local development, staging, and production. Django storage provides several classes and methods that you can use to interact with the storage backend, including methods for reading and writing files, deleting files, and generating URLs for accessing files. It also provides several storage backends out of the box, including support for local file systems, Amazon S3, and Google Cloud Storage, with the option to write your custom storage backend if needed.

Installation

Installing django-storages from pip :

If you'd like to install directly from the source code (perhaps because the master has a bugfix that hasn't yet been made available) :

Install the boto3 library, which is a Python library for interacting with Amazon Web Services (AWS). You can install it using pip :

This is the only supported backend for interacting with Amazon’s S3, S3Boto3Storage, based on the boto3 library.

How to Upload Files to S3 Using Django Storages?

Set up an Amazon S3 bucket and obtain the necessary credentials (access key and secret key) for accessing the bucket.

Set up Django storage to use the S3 backend. You can do this by adding the following settings to your Django settings.py file :

In your Django application, you can use the default_storage object provided by Django storage to handle file uploads. For example, you can use the default_storage.save() method to save a file to S3, like this in your views.py file :

Note that my_file in this example should be a file object, such as a django.core.files.uploadedfile.InMemoryUploadedFile object or a django.core.files.uploadedfile.TemporaryUploadedFile object.

You can also use the default_storage.url() method to generate a URL for accessing the file on S3. You can add this code in the views.py file :

This will give you a URL that you can use to access the file on S3, such as https://s3.amazonaws.com/YOUR_BUCKET_NAME/path/to/saved/file.txt.