Migrating Production Storage from S3 to DigitalOcean Spaces with django-storages

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0530

In October 2025 I moved a production Django app’s entire file-storage layer from AWS S3 to DigitalOcean Spaces. Pet photos, prescription PDFs, clinic logos, the Excel billing exports — all of it. The app had been live for six years by then, serving real veterinary clinics in India, and it had gone the whole of 2024 without a single commit.

Here’s the part worth writing about: the migration touched zero Python. No model changed. No view, no serializer, no upload handler. I changed a handful of environment variables, rebuilt the Docker image for linux/amd64, promoted it, and wrote a one-page runbook. Done.

Migration on Kuldeep Pisda

Migrating Production Storage from S3 to DigitalOcean Spaces with django-storages