Is there any way to bypass the server my Django site is hosted on when uploading files, and just immediately upload to S3 instead?

Question

I am using boto3 to upload massive media files (2GB+) from my Django website to an s3 storage bucket. My issue is that when uploading a file larger than 2.5MB - the connection is immediately timed out and no debug information displays

• I assume what is happening is that Django is using the temporary file upload handler, but the temp file handler won't work on the server the Django app is running on (pythonanywhere free tier).
• This works flawlessly locally, because it just has to copy to the OS, not the server. I would like to skip the web server so I am not using all the storage/bandwidth
• s3.upload_file needs the local path of the file in order to be able to upload it to S3, the only way I could find to do that is grab the temp_path of the file.

# method to chunk the upload process if file is over 2.4MB
def s3_multipart_upload(f, video_id):

    # our server path
    file_path = "media/"
    new_folder = str(video_id)+"/"
    file_name = f.name
    server_path = file_path + new_folder + file_name

    # the file gets copied to ~/tmp/ so grab that path 
    local_path = f.temporary_file_path()

    # create s3 client connection
    s3 = boto3.client('s3', settings.AWS_S3_REGION_NAME, **credentials)

    config = TransferConfig(
        multipart_threshold=1024 * 25,
        max_concurrency=10,multipart_chunksize=1024 * 25,
        use_threads=True
    )

    s3.upload_file(
        local_path,
        settings.AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME,
        server_path,
        ExtraArgs={'ACL': 'public-read'},
        Config=config,
        Callback = ProgressPercentage(local_path)
    )

    return

I would like to be able to upload directly to S3, straight from my website, without the files going through the server (python anywhere). If there is a cleaner way of doing this, a better server I should use, or if there is a way to upload the file without copying to temp first - I'm all ears.

(I am also new to Python/Django/Servers in general, so any help is appreciated)

Answer 1

I am not sure if you have found the answer but you can upload content directly to s3 using signed url mechanism.

1. Request Signed URL for s3 from django backend
2. Use frontend to upload content directory to s3

But I would suggest do this only if you have bigger media files to be uploaded.

I found this as secured approach. https://www.serverless.com/blog/s3-one-time-signed-url