Replace STORAGE_BACKEND and STORAGE_CONFIG configuration parameters with Django's STORAGES

[jeremystretch]

NetBox version

v4.2.1

Feature type

Change to existing functionality

Triage priority

N/A

Proposed functionality

NetBox currently exposes two configuration parameters for configuring file storage:

• STORAGE_BACKEND - Sets the storage backend (e.g. django-storages)
• STORAGE_CONFIG - A dictionary of backend-specific configuration parameters

We can replace these by instead exposing Django's STORAGES setting directly.

Use case

Django's native STORAGE_BACKEND setting was removed in v5.1 and superseded by STORAGES. There is no longer a need to handle the backend selection and configuration via separate configuration parameters.

Database changes

N/A

External dependencies

None

[RangerRick]

I've got the NBE build set up such that I can now test this on our end, and as I worked to reenable S3 storage on my side, I remembered that one of the blockers last time around was the behavior of the storages and what gets persisted to the database.

The short version is: the entire S3 URL is stored to the database, which when inside a cluster is not reachable from the outside. Setting AWS_S3_CUSTOM_DOMAIN is not always feasible, because it would require introspection of the ingress to know what the external hostname is, and doing that reliably is problematic.

In my previous S3 PoC, I wrote a façade storage driver that stored everything relative, but then realized I didn't have enough control over how the image URLs are used elsewhere in the system so they would still not render right if, say, you have NetBox behind a proxy using a prefix, so I was still forced to hardcode the ingress hostname to make it all work.

It feels like handling this well is more complicated than just dealing with prefixes; the current S3 storage behavior assumes your S3 host never changes.

[jeremystretch]

Superseded by #18896