Ben Cooper’s Weblog

I have been amazed at how cheap reliable storage is these days with services like Amazon S3. The S3 introduction documentation doesn’t mention using python and django so I thought I’d implement the demo in django. It really is very simple to take advantage of S3 in your django apps, as Adrian shows here.

Grab the S3 libary from here.

My view looks like this:

BUCKET_NAME = 's3demo'

def upload_and_view(request):
    conn = S3.AWSAuthConnection('your access key', 'your secret key')

    if request.method == 'POST':
        post_data = request.POST.copy()
        post_data.update(request.FILES)
        filedata = post_data['uploaded_file']['content']
        filename = post_data['uploaded_file']['filename']
        content_type = mimetypes.guess_type(filename)[0]
        if not content_type:
            content_type = 'text/plain'

        conn.put(BUCKET_NAME, filename, S3.S3Object(filedata),
                    {'x-amz-acl': 'public-read', 'Content-Type': content_type})

    bucket = conn.list_bucket(BUCKET_NAME)
    bucket_entries = bucket.entries

    return render_to_response('s3demo/upload_and_view.html', {'entries': bucket_entries})

The template is a simple web form. bucket_entries contains a list of files in the S3 bucket. Since I’ve set the ACL to be public readable I can print a list of urls like so:

{% for entry in entries %}
<a href="http://s3demo.s3.amazonaws.com/{{ entry.key }}">{{ entry.key }}</a><br />
{% endfor %}

Great stuff!