Using staticfiles with STORAGES in Django 4.2

, Jochen

The other day I was trying to improve a management command of django-cast to make it easier to backup media files like images and videos. There's already an existing command, but it had to assume that you stored your media files on s3 and wanted the backup to be stored on the local filesystem. It would be great if you could configure your production and backup storage and have the backup command work either way. And the new STORAGES setting added in Django 4.2 looks like a perfect fit for this. So I tried using such a configuration:

STORAGES = {
    "default": {"BACKEND": "config.settings.local.CustomS3Boto3Storage"},
    "staticfiles": {
        "BACKEND": "django.core.files.storage.FileSystemStorage",
        "OPTIONS": {
            "location": "staticfiles",
            "base_url": "/static/",
        },
    },
    "production": {"BACKEND": "config.settings.local.CustomS3Boto3Storage"},
    "backup": {
        "BACKEND": "django.core.files.storage.FileSystemStorage",
        "OPTIONS": {
            "location": ROOT_DIR.path("backups").path("media"),
        },
    },
}

But it didn't work. It took me longer than I would like to admit to figure out that I should have used this config:

STORAGES = {
    "default": {"BACKEND": "config.settings.local.CustomS3Boto3Storage"},
    "staticfiles": {"BACKEND": "django.contrib.staticfiles.storage.StaticFilesStorage"},
    "production": {"BACKEND": "config.settings.local.CustomS3Boto3Storage"},
    "backup": {
        "BACKEND": "django.core.files.storage.FileSystemStorage",
        "OPTIONS": {
            "location": ROOT_DIR.path("backups").path("media"),
        },
    },
}

If you want to replace django.contrib.staticfiles.storage.StaticFilesStorage with whitenoise for production, it's sufficient overwrite the backend in the production settings like this:

STORAGES["staticfiles"]["BACKEND"] = "whitenoise.storage.CompressedManifestStaticFilesStorage"

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