I am looking into possibly setting up a CDN to use with my Wagtail sites. I am thinking that this will be a more efficient way to manage media uploads during stage/production pushes, since right now the media folder has to be manually copied from server to server on deploy. If all of the images were being accessed from a CDN then this wouldn't be an issue.
This would be my first time using a CDN so I'm looking for advice. There is lots of info on using a CDN with WordPress, but not a lot of documentation on setting one up with Wagtail/Django. I have the following questions about it:
Does anyone have any suggestions on the best way to implement the CDN with Wagtail?
How does it handle the uploads that the user submits through the CMS? Most of the images will be uploaded as part of the static files, but how does it work when the user uploads a photo as part of a post?
Which CDN companies have you had the best/worst experiences with? The sites I am planning to use this for are professional/business, but not e-commerce.
Also, if there is a more efficient way to handle the transfer of media uploads from one environment to another than using a CDN, I'd love to hear your suggestions for that too. As of right now I've had to copy the media folder over after doing the deploy, and I will have to do this every time I make a change to the site.
Thanks in advance for your assistance.
The following resources can be helpful for your required setup in Wagtail (later on today I can provide you some more details):
Frontend cache invalidator for pages (so not only for static and media files)
Link: http://docs.wagtail.io/en/latest/reference/contrib/frontendcache.html#frontendcache-aws-cloudfront
Storing media files in Amazon Web Services S3 buckets
This should be a better solution instead of copying media files from server to server. In this case Amazon Web Services CloudFront (CDN) would be a perfect choice.
Link: https://django-storages.readthedocs.io/en/latest/backends/amazon-S3.html#amazon-s3
More info CloudFront: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/
Static file cache invalidation with Django Whitenoise
Can be relevant to clear the cache for a new deployment (the static files will have a unique filename so CDN will have a new file cache from its origin after the deployment)
Link: http://whitenoise.evans.io/en/stable/django.html
CloudFront from AWS will have my personal choice for CDN. Besides the awesome resources/services AWS has to offer, CloudFront is simple to setup and has one of the best CDN's out there.
Finally a CDN for serving static- and media files has nothing to do with Wagtail specifically. There are some (see list above) nice apps available for Django itself, but you are free to choose another CDN solution (like Cloudflare).
So setting up a AWS S3 Bucket for each environment (tst/acc/stg/prd) and use it for uploading you media files (so the files aren't on the server anymore) and setup a CloudFront distribution for these buckets would be a proper solution for your problem.
Best regards,
Rob Moorman
Related
I am trying to make a django application (with the Rest framework) and I was just researching and came across different ways to serve media files.
what is the recommended approach for a project/app that lets you upload pictures so that other users can download them?
I came across CDN such as uploadcare, cloudinary and then ofcourse amazon S3 as well. Is there a difference in using these services like uploadcare vs S3 in terms of speed or scaling?
thanks in advance,
I have a Django server running in an elastic beanstalk environment. I would like to have it render HTML templates pulled from a separate AWS S3 Bucket.
I am using the Django-storages library, which lets me use static and media files from the bucket, but I can't figure out how to get it to render templates.
The reasoning for doing it like this is that once my site is running, I would like to be able to add these HTML templates without having to redeploy the entire site.
Thank you
To my best knowledge, Django-storages is responsible for managing static assets and media files, it doesn't mount the S3 bucket to the file system, what you might be looking for is something like S3Fuse which will mount the bucket on the File System, which will allow you to update the template and have them sync. This might not be the best solution because even if you got the sync to work, Django might not pick those changes and serve the templates from memory.
I believe what you're looking for is a Continuous Delivery pipeline, that way you won't be worried about hosting.
Good Question though.
I have a severless website that I am quite happy with. Unfortunately, there are files in my assets folder that I would rather not be served, and I am not sure how to achieve this.
As an example, S3 bucket mywebsite.com has several HTML files and an assets folder. If I go to mywebsite.com/assets/images/image.png CloudFront serves it up.
This isn't too concerning. But some of the JS stuff with API endpoints, etc should not exposed like this.
Any advice is much appreciated.
Sincerely,
ngp
I am running a django app on heroku. I am using Amazon S3 to store static and media assets. I want to speed up my resource loading by using a CDN. Is is possible to use a CDN other than one of Amazon's, since I am using S3? My hosting is from namecheap.com if that matters.
Edit
I guess my main question if whether what urls the content on where my CDN should point to... i.e.
[ACCOUNT_NUM].[CDN_COMPANY].com points to cdn.[MYSITE].com
or
[ACCOUNT_NUM].[CDN_COMPANY].com points to [MY_S3_BUCKET].s3.amazonaws.com/
or perhaps something else?
I'm about two months in with django. I've been following tutorials on youtube and such and one of the tutorials says that I have to use two servers when deploying my site. Django will be served from heroku and static files from amazon s3. I have to pay for two seperate servers to deploy a django app? I did not expect this and this would not be within my budget if this is so. Is he wrong or is this just for special cases like his? Any help would be appreciated
No, sounds like the video is a bit confusing. There is a distinction between static assets, ie the CSS/JS etc that makes up your site, and dynamic media, ie any user-uploaded content.
Heroku can quite happily serve static assets from the filesystem, and their docs on deploying Django state exactly how to do this. However you cannot store dynamically uploaded content on Heroku, since the filesystem is ephemeral. If your app allows this, you need to save them somewhere permanent such as S3.
Note however that S3 is really cheap; hosting media files there should only cost you pennies.
You don't need 2 different servers for deploying your django project. You can just use a single Amazon EC2 instance then install Nginx/Apache+Supervisor+Gunicorn+Python. After that, you just need to configure the location of your static files from your virtualhost. Here's a tutorial from digital ocean.