Serving protected files NGINX and Django - django

Question

I am trying to serve protected media files with Nginx sendfile and X-Accel-Redirect using Django 2.0.
This is my Nginx configuration:
server {
listen 8000;
server_name localhost;
charset utf-8;
sendfile on;
# Protected media
location /protected {
internal;
alias /Users/username/Documents/sat23/venv/media/;
}
# Django static
location /static {
alias /Users/username/Documents/sat23/venv/static/;
}
# All other requests.
location / {
uwsgi_pass django;
include /Users/username/Documents/sat23/venv/uwsgi_params;
}
}
Then in my urls.py I added a simple view that should serve my media files (I'll configure permissions later):
def serveMedia(request):
url = request.path.replace('media', 'protected')
response = HttpResponse('')
response['X-Accel-Redirect'] = url
response['Content-Type'] = ''
return response
urlpatterns += [
path('/media/', serveMedia, name='protected_media')
]
However whenever I call localhost:8000/media/users/user35.jpg, I just get a Django (not nginx) 404 page, saying that Django tried all the configured paths and it couldn't find the requested one.
So I had a suspicion that my view just doesn't work. I then rewrote it like this:
def serveMedia(request):
return HttpResponse(content=b'Hello there')
And sure enough it doesn't get called. But I have no idea why. Could someone help me out?
P.S. Any recommendations on configuring nginx conf are also very welcome!

Answer 1

There are no capturing groups in your Django path call there, so that will only match /media/ verbatim.
You might want to use the old-school url route with a regexp like
urlpatterns += [
url(r'/media/.+', serveMedia),
]
to capture everything that starts with /media/