Source: 📖 Django for Professionals ch12 p176

Configuring Django for media uploads

In order to safely accept media uploads (see Static files vs media files), we need to instantiate several configurations. We'll begin with the following in settings.py:

# settings.py

...

MEDIA_URL = '/media/'
MEDIA_ROOT = str(BASE_DIR.joinpath('media'))

MEDIA_ROOT is the absolute filesystem path to the directory for user-uploaded files, and MEDIA_URL is the URL we can use in out templates to access these files. Be sure to make both of these changes after the definition of the STATICFILES_FINDERS constant which appears near the bottom of settings.py.

Next we made the media directory we just told settings.py to expect at the project level.

$ mkdir media

For Django to be able to handle images, we must have pillow installed.

$ docker-compose exec {service_name} pipenv install pillow==7.2.0
$ docker-compose down
$ docker-compse up -d --build

The final configuration is for us to be able to see media items locally — since media files are assumed to exist in production (they are uploaded by users), we need a way to see them in the development environment. To do this, we add the following configurations in the project-level urls.py file:

# urls.py

from django.conf import settings
from django.conf.urls.static imort static
from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path, include

urlpatterns = [
	...
	# Your url patterns
	...
] + static(settings.MEDIA_URL, document_root=settings.MEDIA_ROOT)