This is a two part post which will guide you to host your own django app in a production environment using Amazon Web Services (AWS) for storing static files and Heroku for hosting the project.

Deploy Django part 1

This part will cover the storing of static files in AWS S3 Bucket.

AWS Setup

1. Create an AWS Account here.

2. Create a new S3 Bucket

Navigate to S3 from here.
Click Create Bucket.
Create a unique bucket name.
Select region according to your Primary user’s location. For reference, see: AWS Regions and Endpoints.
Keep other settings as the default ones and create the bucket.

3. Create credentials for AWS User

Navigate to IAM Users.
Select Create New Users
Enter the username.
Ensure Programmatic Access is selected and hit Next.
Select Download credentials and keep the credentials.csv file safe as it will be required later.

4. Add policies to your IAM user

Default policies

Navigate to IAM Home.
Select user and click on Permissions tab.
Click on Attach Existing Policies Directly and add any policies as per your requirement.

Custom Policies

Navigate to IAM Home.
Select user and click on Permissions tab.
Click on Attach Existing Policies Directly and select Create Policy.

Go to the JSON tab and paste the policy given below. Change all <your_bucket_name> to the name of your bucket in S3 (set above). Do not change version date.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
      {
          "Effect": "Allow",
          "Action": [
              "s3:ListAllMyBuckets"
          ],
          "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::*"
      },
      {
          "Effect": "Allow",
          "Action": [
              "s3:ListBucket",
              "s3:GetBucketLocation",
              "s3:ListBucketMultipartUploads",
              "s3:ListBucketVersions"
          ],
          "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::<your_bucket_name>"
      },
      {
          "Effect": "Allow",
          "Action": [
              "s3:*Object*",
              "s3:ListMultipartUploadParts",
              "s3:AbortMultipartUpload"
          ],
          "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::<your_bucket_name>/*"
      }
  ]
}

The Actions that we choose to set are based on what we want this user to be able to do. The line "s3:*Object*", will handle a lot of our permissions for handling objects for the specified bucket within the Recourse Value.

Django Setup

1. Install requirements

boto and boto3 are python bindings for AWS. django-storages are used by django to send static files to AWS.

$ pip install boto boto3 django-storages

2. Update settings and migrate

Add the app storages to the INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py
```
INSTALLED_APPS = [
  ...
  'storages',
  ...
]
```
Run migrations
```
$ python manage.py migrate
```

3. Set up the AWS module

Create aws module in same directory as settings.py

$ pwd
/path/to/<your-project>/<main-app>/
$ ls
__init__.py settings.py wsgi.py urls.py
$ mkdir aws && cd aws
$ touch __init__.py
$ touch utils.py
$ touch conf.py

In utils.py add the following

  from storages.backends.s3boto3 import S3Boto3Storage

  StaticRootS3BotoStorage = lambda: S3Boto3Storage(location='static')
  MediaRootS3BotoStorage  = lambda: S3Boto3Storage(location='media')

Fetch the Access Key Id and Secret Access Key from credentials.csv downloaded earlier. Then in conf.py add the following

  import datetime
  AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID = "<your_access_key_id>"
  AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY = "<your_secret_access_key>"
  AWS_FILE_EXPIRE = 200
  AWS_PRELOAD_METADATA = True
  AWS_QUERYSTRING_AUTH = True

  DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE = '<your-project>.aws.utils.MediaRootS3BotoStorage'
  STATICFILES_STORAGE = '<your-project>.aws.utils.StaticRootS3BotoStorage'
  AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME = '<your_bucket_name>'
  S3DIRECT_REGION = 'us-west-2'
  S3_URL = '//%s.s3.amazonaws.com/' % AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME
  MEDIA_URL = '//%s.s3.amazonaws.com/media/' % AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME
  MEDIA_ROOT = MEDIA_URL
  STATIC_URL = S3_URL + 'static/'
  ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX = STATIC_URL + 'admin/'

  two_months = datetime.timedelta(days=61)
  date_two_months_later = datetime.date.today() + two_months
  expires = date_two_months_later.strftime("%A, %d %B %Y 20:00:00 GMT")

  AWS_HEADERS = { 
      'Expires': expires,
      'Cache-Control': 'max-age=%d' % (int(two_months.total_seconds()), ),
  }

4. Update settings.py

from <your-project>.aws.conf import *

5. Push the static files to S3 Bucket

$ python manage.py collectstatic

Note

Any existing media files (before the AWS setup) cannot be uploaded to the bucket automatically, they have to be manually uploaded either from AWS website, Django admin or through aws-cli. For cli, see: AWS CLI Setup
Once AWS has been setup, all media files will be directly uploaded to AWS bucket.
For testing, to disable the AWS upload and use local static files, comment out
from <your-project>.aws.conf import *
from settings.py

Deploying a django app - Part 1

Using AWS for storing static files