django-hashedfilenamestorage

A Django storage backend that names files by hash value.

By default, django.core.files.storage.FileSystemStorage deals with conflicting filenames by appending an underscore and a random 7 character alphanumeric string to the file. For instance, if you try to create hello.txt when it already exists, it will rename it as e.g. hello_a12mkj3.txt.

django-hashedfilenamestorage creates hashed filenames, so if you try to create hello.txt with the content Hello world!, it will save it as d3486ae9136e7856bc42212385ea797094475802.txt. Directory names and extensions are preserved, only the root filename is changed. This reduces the number of duplicates stored in the underlying backend, and implies that these files can be served from a static cache that never expires.

Installing

The easiest way to install django-hashedfilenamestorage is to use pip:

pip install django-hashedfilenamestorage

Quick Start

In your Django settings file:

• Set DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE to 'django_hashedfilenamestorage.storage.HashedFilenameFileSystemStorage'

This gives you hashed filenames, backed on Django's FileSystemStorage storage class.

HashedFilenameMetaStorage

You can define a new underlying storage class by using HashedFilenameMetaStorage to wrap it:

from django.core.files.storage import get_storage_class

from django_hashedfilenamestorage.storage import HashedFilenameMetaStorage

HashedFilenameMyStorage = HashedFilenameMetaStorage(
    storage_class=get_storage_class('myapp.storage.MyStorage'),
)

Hashing algorithm

HashedFilenameMetaStorage is meant to generate duplicate filenames for files with identical contents. To do this, it reads the contents of the file and generates a SHA-1 hash of them.

Filenames have their extensions preserved, so it is possible to have duplicate contents on the filesystem, but it is important to help serve files with their proper content types.