Django + Nginx save uploded file to other server and reverse file - django

Question

I have 2 servers: first for Nginx and Django and second server for storage
Nginx and app server IP: 192.168.1.1
storage server IP: 192.168.1.2
Nginx installed on two servers.
In Django config media path:
MEDIA_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR,'media')
MEDIA_URL = '/media/'
Nginx config is in the first server:
server {
listen 80;
server_name 192.168.1.1;
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log ;
location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
location /media/ {
proxy_pass http://192.168.1.2/;
}
location / {
uwsgi_pass unix:/tmp/uwsgi/app.sock;
include uwsgi_params;
}
location /static/ {
alias /home/ubuntu/app/static/;
}
}
and storage server Nginx config:
server {
listen 80;
server_name 192.168.1.2;
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log ;
location /media/ {
alias /home/ubuntu/app/media;
}
}
Questions:
How can Django save (upload file) to the storage server (192.168.1.2)?
better if suggest solutions with minimum changes in code.
How Nginx can reverse files from a storage server?
the end user just typing 192.168.1.1

Answer 1

Solution 1: Network File System (NFS)
An example of NFS is GlusterFS.
What it does is, it makes multiple disks or servers available as a single directory. So you can configure it to show your other server as media directory and any files you put in there, it will be automatically stored in your other server. And you can fetch those files as if they are in the media directory even though they are on another machine. No changes required to your django code, or nginx config.
Solution 2: Custom File Storage backend
Another solution is to write your own File Storage backend and save the images to your second server from there. In fact, there's a library called django-storages which supports uploading files to another server using FTP. See docs: http://django-storages.readthedocs.io/en/latest/backends/ftp.html
Personally, second solution seems better to me because you don't really need NFS right now. And even if you do later on, you can install Gluster on your second server and scale out from there.