A Django app for linking static apps hosted on Amazon S3 to URLs in a standard Django project.
With django-s3-proxy, you can use a subdirectory on your domain like doordash.com/my-app to access a Static Website hosted in an Amazon S3 bucket by forwarding resource requests to their corresponding file in S3.
Inspiration from django-proxy by @mjumbewu
At DoorDash, many of our internal apps are written as single page Angular apps. Our main site is built using the Django framework, and our static assets are automatically uploaded and hosted on S3 using the great Boto and django-storages extensions.
For ease of development, these internal apps are hosted in their own Amazon S3 bucket independent of our Django app, and often have their own repository. We find this approach has a number of benefits:
- We can develop and deploy our static apps independently of our Django deploys
- We can use tools like Bower, Yeoman, and Grunt without complicated configuration to work in the same repo as our Django app
- It forces us to develop and use a solid internal RESTful API
While hosting static apps on S3 is generally very solid, one major disadvantage is that Static Websites have their own region-specific website endpoint for each bucket, which can only be linked to our doordash.com URL config through DNS, e.g. adding a CNAME record from my-app.doordash.com to my-app.doordash.com.s3-website-us-west-1.amazonaws.com.
django-s3-proxy allows us to map a subdirectory like doordash.com/my-app to its corresponding Static Webite in an Amazon S3 bucket by proxying requests, enabling us to host our static apps wherever we want to.