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pythondjangoinstallationsorl-thumbnail

Minimal developer setup of sorl-thumbnail with Django 1.7

My initial goal is to use sorl-thumbnail in the most basic way to cache on my filesystem cropped images that are downloaded from external sites. I don't care about performance at the moment and don't want to yet setup extra systems (memcachedb, redis). I am using the development runserver.

On the one hand the docs make it sound like I must use one of these two options. I feel like other places I have read that it can be setup to not require these KV stores. As one evidence for that, I see the setting sorl.thumbnail.kvstores.dbm_kvstore.KVStore in the reference docs (which says A simple Key Value Store has no dependencies outside the standard Python library and uses the DBM modules to store the data.), but I cannot get that to work either (see below).

Using Python 2.7.5, Django 1.7.1, Pillow 2.6.1, and sorl-thumbnail 12.1c.

Added sorl.thumbnail as part of my INSTALLED_APPS.

Added to settings.py:

THUMBNAIL_DEBUG = True
import logging
from sorl.thumbnail.log import ThumbnailLogHandler

handler = ThumbnailLogHandler()
handler.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
logging.getLogger('sorl.thumbnail').addHandler(handler)

I see no other logging in my web server console despite this.

Attempted to sync my db:

$ ./manage.py migrate thumbnail
Operations to perform:
  Apply all migrations: thumbnail
Running migrations:
  Applying thumbnail.0001_initial... FAKED

No tables appear to be added to my database.

At this point, I've added to my template the load directive and the following snippet, where item.image_url is a models.URLField which works fine apart from thumbnail.

{% thumbnail item.image_url "235x200" crop="center" as im %}
<img src="{{ im.url }}">
{% empty %}
<p>No image</p>
{% endthumbnail %}

When I try to view the page, I see broken image links:

http://127.0.0.1:8001/<myapp>/cache/cf/43/cf43126f1f961593650b5df4791e329f.jpg 404 (NOT FOUND)

My MEDIA_URL is not set, though I tried playing with that to no avail.

I further tried putting into the settings: THUMBNAIL_KVSTORE = 'sorl.thumbnail.kvstores.dbm_kvstore.KVStore' but this gives the DJANGO error in the browser: Error importing module sorl.thumbnail.kvstores.dbm_kvstore: "No module named dbm_kvstore".

Can I configure it in this way, not requiring memcached, and if so, which of my settings are wrong/missing? If I must use memcached, how many more settings must I configure in addition to its installation? Thanks.

Update

Here are my settings involving static assets. 

STATIC_URL = '/static/'
STATIC_ROOT = '/tmp/static/'
STATICFILES_DIRS = (
    PROJECT_ROOT.child("static"),
)
STATICFILES_FINDERS = (
    'django.contrib.staticfiles.finders.FileSystemFinder',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles.finders.AppDirectoriesFinder',
    #'django.contrib.staticfiles.finders.DefaultStorageFinder', If enabled breaks my LESS CSS.
    'static_precompiler.finders.StaticPrecompilerFinder',
)
# STATICFILES_STORAGE not set but should default to 'django.contrib.staticfiles.storage.StaticFilesStorage'

I am already serving some static images from mysite/static/img. And I forgot to mention that I am using the Django Static Precompiler for LESS CSS. My LESS files are at mysite/static/css and are compiled to /tmp/static/COMPILED/.

I see there is a cache dir in my project root mysite, and it does have the file which is trying to be served: cache/6a/a6/6aa6ebf6cef5bf481fd37d4947d25623.jpg.

I've read the documentation on serving static assets but it's unclear to me what settings to change. Seems that I either need to have that jpg produced in a different directory, or add this directory to the list of dirs from which I'm serving static assets. I tried adding this path to STATICFILES_DIRS but that didn't work.

Solution

  • Both other answers correctly suggested problems with serving up media files. Here is the complete list of code changes that were required:

    1. I had glossed over the fact that MEDIA assets are not the same as STATIC assets. This answer is the one that tipped me off to the fact that sorl-thumbnail is relying on MEDIA_URL to form its URL, and accordingly, MEDIA_ROOT. For my development, I set the following:

      • MEDIA_URL = '/media/'
      • MEDIA_ROOT = '/tmp/media/'

    2. I used this snippet for URLconf changes for serving up the media files. At this point I put an image in the media directory and made sure my template could correctly reference it.

    3. By this point, I had manually removed the sorl-thumbnail generated thumbnails, but no permutation of settings and activity would regenerate them. I remembered that getting your key value store/database/cached images out of sync requires manual cleanup. The management command ./manage.py thumbnail cleanup did the job, and it began regenerating again.

    4. Also worth noting is that I did not have to set THUMBNAIL_KVSTORE at all, or setup any key value store.

    I hope this helps get others get started faster in setting up their dev environment.