This Python package provides a Django storage implementation that uses a single database table.

Django developers may find this package to be most helpful for use in their test and prototype environments. This package may also be useful in launching small-scale projects/environments quickly without needing additional infrastructure setup.

WARNING: For production applications, please consider using a CDN instead of this package, as it is not a good practice to serve files from a database. Website performance will suffer! Please see the section "Alternatives" below for performant and scalable storage options.

Features / Benefits

Easy to install and configure.
Serve files properly when there are multiple django servers under a load balancer.
Files persist in database when application server is rebuilt (as long as database is not hosted on the application server).
In unit testing scenarios, created files can be automatically "rolled back" out of existence if the unit test uses a transaction, which is how django.test.TestCase works.

Installation

pip install django-single-table-db-storage

Setup

In your django settings file, add 'django_single_table_db_storage' to INSTALLED_APPS.

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    'django_single_table_db_storage',
    ...
]

Also in your django settings file, set up the default storage. It is recommended that you add a TODO to remind yourself to use a better storage in the future.

# TODO: As this project scales, a CDN or S3-compatible storage for production
#       might be a better solution.
DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE = 'django_single_table_db_storage.storage.SingleTableDbFileStorage'

In your django settings file, you should determine the default accesibility of the files that are uploaded.

DJANGO_SINGLE_TABLE_DEFAULT_PUBLIC = True  # or set it to False. The default is False.

Mount the URLs where you want in your urls.py file.

urlpatterns = [
    ... 
    path('files/', include('django_single_table_db_storage.urls')),
    ....
]

Run the database migrations to create the table.

./manage.py migrate

...And now your environment is set to use the file storage.

Alternatives

You can find other file storage alternatives for Django here:

https://djangopackages.org/grids/g/storage-backends/

This package contains a similar and possibly better implementation to this library, depending on your use case and license that you prefer:

https://github.com/kimetrica/django-binary-database-files/