Question

I have a Django application that uses FileSystemStorage for development and S3BotoStorage for staging and production. Everything is working fine. There are some small differences between these systems that I have noticed:

1. FileSystemStorage will append the MEDIA_ROOT value to any file it
   saves. S3BotoStorage by default will not.

2. If I delete a model instance with a FileField, S3BotoStorage will
   delete the FileField’s file and the directory the file is in if the
   file is the only file in that directory. FileSystemStorage will not
   delete the empty directory.

I can work around these differences, but they add conditionals to my code. The first of these is easiest — I just initialize the S3BotoStorage class with location=MEDIA_ROOT. Is there a way to handle the second one in a similar fashion? Can I configure either storage class’ directory deletion behavior? Should I just override the the FileSystemStorage’s delete method?

Answer 1

The code for FileSystemStorage.delete (line 144) doesn’t have any configuration that I can see:

def delete(self, name):
    name = self.path(name)
    # If the file exists, delete it from the filesystem.
    # Note that there is a race between os.path.exists and os.remove:
    # if os.remove fails with ENOENT, the file was removed
    # concurrently, and we can continue normally.
    if os.path.exists(name):
        try:
            os.remove(name)
        except OSError as e:
            if e.errno != errno.ENOENT:
                raise

So, yes, the simplest and cleanest method is probably to override its delete method to additionally check for the case of an empty directory.