Selecting whitenoise still requires AWS setup

I had selected whitenoise from the django cookiecutter configuration, but when it comes to deploying on heroku I get an improperly configured error if eg DJANGO_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID isn’t set (same with the other AWS envs). The settings file also outputs the comment at the top: `Use Amazon’s S3 for storing static files and uploaded media’ even though the whitenoise middleware looks to be properly setup.

[jayfk]

Whitenoise is working pretty well in the current configuration on multiple platforms. If we are going to remove it, we have to find another library that supports all of them, too.

From my POV, this is a documentation problem:

• whitenoise is used for static files
• django-storages with AWS is used for media files

That makes total sense, because static and media files both have different requirements. Static files can be generated from scratch for each deployment, media files OTOH are ideally stored in a central place with proper backups (S3).

For certain deployments, it might make sense to add an option to let whitenoise also handle the media files.

[yunti]

@pydanny. Thanks for the input. I think the assumption here is that all sites need to serve media files, where for a lot, they don’t so a simplified Whitenoise (plus CDN) does have value.

The original question was assuming no media files were required and was never about whitenoise being used to serve media files (that really doesn’t seem to be it’s intended use case) . sorry if this wasn’t clear.

The default setup when choosing whitenoise almost works with this, it just needs a WHITENOISE_MAX_AGE to be set to work with with a CDN. (All the AWS settings are then redundant if not using S3 for static files).

So perhaps cookiecutter should have a ‘use_whitenoise’ y/n and a ‘use_aws_for_media’ y/n question where if whitenoise is selected all awss option to do with static file serving are dropped eg AWS_EXPIRY and if ‘use_aws_for_media’ is n then the rest of the settings are dropped.

I don’t mind if you wish to get the cookiecutter config options down to have this in the docs.

Happy to make the changes needed as so far with django-cookiecutter I’ve done,

• Whitenoise, static only
• Whitenoise + CDN (static)
• Whitenoise + CDN (static) + AWS (media)

(Probably should have ditched whitenoise in the last case, but it evolved to that overtime. )