django storages aws s3 delete file from model record

Question

I have based my django aws S3 solution on https://simpleisbetterthancomplex.com/tutorial/2017/08/01/how-to-setup-amazon-s3-in-a-django-project.html.

Now I am trying to find a way to delete a row in the model that contains the S3 file. I am able to delete the row with .delete() but it doesnt delete in S3.

How do I make the delete row to also delete in S3 ?

Below are my code:

https://gitlab.com/firdausmah/railercom/blob/master/railercomapp/api.py

@api_view(['POST'])
def delete_employee(request):
    # ----- YAML below for Swagger -----
    """
    description: This API deletes employee
    parameters:
      - name: employee_id
        type: integer
        required: true
        location: form
    """
    employee_id = request.POST['employee_id']
    employee = Employee.objects.get(id = employee_id)
    logging.debug(f"API employee username {employee.username}")
    employee.delete() <---------- here is where the delete row happens
    return Response("Employee Deleted!", status=status.HTTP_200_OK)

https://gitlab.com/firdausmah/railercom/blob/master/railercomapp/models.py

class Employee(models.Model):
    user = models.OneToOneField(User, on_delete=models.CASCADE, related_name='employee')
    company = models.ForeignKey(Company)
    username = models.CharField(max_length=30, blank=False)
    upload = models.FileField(blank=True) <--- S3 field

https://gitlab.com/firdausmah/railercom/blob/master/railercom/settings.py (AWS settings)

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID = config('AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID')
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY = config('AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY')
AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME = config('AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME')
AWS_S3_CUSTOM_DOMAIN = '%s.s3.amazonaws.com' % AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME
AWS_S3_OBJECT_PARAMETERS = {
    'CacheControl': 'max-age=86400',
}

DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE = 'railercomapp.storage_backends.MediaStorage'

https://gitlab.com/firdausmah/railercom/blob/master/railercomapp/storage_backends.py from storages.backends.s3boto3 import S3Boto3Storage

class MediaStorage(S3Boto3Storage):
    location = 'media/yy'
    file_overwrite = False

Answer 1

You have to explicitly delete the file. You could write a post delete signal or do it in the delete_employee function.

employee.upload.delete(save=False)  # delete file
employee.delete()  # delete model instance

The docs for FileField.delete() explains this.

Note that when a model is deleted, related files are not deleted. If you need to cleanup orphaned files, you’ll need to handle it yourself (for instance, with a custom management command that can be run manually or scheduled to run periodically via e.g. cron).

You should also make sure that there's no other FileField that references the exact same file before deleting it.