django-storage-swift allows Django applications to use OpenStack Swift as a file storage layer.

• Reads/writes files into/out of Swift.
• Automatically derives the correct URL to allow files to be accessed through a web browser based on information returned from the authorisation server.
  • Allows you to override the host, port and path as necessary.
  • Supports the generation of temporary URLs to restrict access to files.

To get started with django-storage-swift, install it through pip, then in your settings.py file, add:

DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE='swift.storage.SwiftStorage'

django-storage-swift recognises the following options.

django-swift-storage will automatically query the authentication server for the URL where your files can be accessed, which takes the form http://server:port/v1/AUTH_token/.

Sometimes you want to override the server and port (for example if you're developing using devstack inside Vagrant). This can be accomplished with SWIFT_BASE_URL.

The provided value is parsed, and:

• host and port override any automatically derived values
• any path component is put before derived path components.

So if your auth server returns http://10.0.2.2:8080/v1/AUTH_012345abcd/ and you have SWIFT_BASE_URL="http://127.0.0.1:8888/foo", the url function will a path based on http://127.0.0.1:8888/foo/v1/AUTH_012345abcd/.

Temporary URLs provide a means to grant a user permission to access a file for a limited time only and without making the entire container public.

Temporary URLs work as described in the Swift documentation. (The code to generate the signatures is heavily based on their implementation.) They require setup of a key for signing: the process is described in the OpenStack documentation.

Once installed and configured, use of django-storage-swift should be automatic and seamless.

You can verify that swift is indeed being used by running, inside python manage.py shell:

from django.core.files.storage import default_storage
default_storage.connection

The result should be <<swiftclient.client.Connection object ...>>

• I'm getting permission errors accessing my files: If you are not using temporary URLs, you may need to make the container publically readable. See this helpful discussion. If you are using temporary URLs, verify that your key is set correctly.