Configure Storage Backend

Select and Setup Storage Backend¶

You can use Amazon S3 as a file storage backend (if you set the env flag USE_AWS=True, more on that below), or you can use the local storage of the host machine via a Docker volume.

AWS Storage Backend¶

If you want to use AWS S3 to store files (primarily pdfs, but also exports, tokens and txt files), you will need an Amazon AWS account to setup S3. This README does not cover the AWS side of configuration, but there are a number of tutorials and guides to getting AWS configured to be used with a django project.

Once you have an S3 bucket configured, you'll need to set the following env variables in your .env file (the .django file in .envs/.production or .envs/.local, depending on your target environment). Our sample .envs only show these fields in the .production samples, but you could use them in the .local env file too.

Here the variables you need to set to enable AWS S3 storage:

1. USE_AWS - set to true since you're using AWS, otherwise the backend will use a docker volume for storage.
2. DJANGO_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID - the access key ID created by AWS when you set up your IAM user (see tutorials above).
3. DJANGO_AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY - the secret access key created by AWS when you set up your IAM user (see tutorials above)
4. DJANGO_AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME - the name of the AWS bucket you created to hold the files.
5. DJANGO_AWS_S3_REGION_NAME - the region of the AWS bucket you configured.

Django Storage Backend¶

Setting USE_AWS=false will use the disk space in the django container. When using the local docker compose stack, the celery workers and django containers share the same disk, so this works fine. Our production configuration would not work properly with USE_AWS=false, however, as each container has its own disk.