Media file serving

[mintyPT]

Django does not provide file serving out of the box. It's easy to solve this for static files (using whitenoise), but that leaves us lacking for serving media files. In the past, I used a nginx container alongside django, to serve those files.

Issue is: I'm not sure how to replicate the same behavior with kamal.

I was thinking of using nginx as an acessory, but how do I then route all requests to {{host}}/media to nginx and not django? Or better yet, is this the way to go? (I'm not looking into using S3-like services, would prefer to keep media files on the server)

[tuladhar]

Since, Kamal doesn't support path-based virtual hosting, consider hosting it on different subdomain such as assets. or media. to serve your media files and use Nginx in the container to serve them.

[michjnich]

@mintyPT

I've had the same struggle and have "solved" it (OK, a little hacky, but it's working) with an nginx accessory in my deploy.yaml running on a different port, then I set the static URL if I'm running in docker.

STATIC_URL = f"http://{SERVER_IP}:8081/static/" if DOCKER_CONTAINER else "static/"

DOCKER_CONTAINER is just a hardcoded ENV var in the Dockerfile to indicate that's what's in use.

[shahid-0]

Can you elaborate it little bit, I am new to both nginx and kamal. I have deployed my app using kamal 2 but it's not loading the static files

[michjnich]

I'm sorry, this was ages ago now. I abandoned kamal becasue it was just too hacky for django projects. I'm sure it's great for rails stuff, but I was just fighting it every step of the way. So I just gave up and wrote my own scripts :)

[shahid-0]

So, can I also abandon Kamal for Django projects? Because I also tried a lot lol.

[michjnich]

Entirely up to you. That's what I did :)