gcloud raises NotFound exception on self.storage.url(self.name)

[sww314]

I am serializing an ImageFileField with Django RestFramework. If the file does not exist it raises NotFound().

I am not sure how the other network storage layers work, but this is not how the file storage in Django core works it will simply return a URL.

I suggest the code be changed to return the URL without checking to see if the blob exists.

[zisk0]

Hi!

We have been hitting the same problem. When URL is built, _get_blob() is called and raises a NotFound exception if file does not exists. As a workaround, we wrote a CustomImageField that builds the URL in case the file doesn't exist, but _get_blob() is always executed. I also realized it introduces some overhead when listing objects with images. Is it possible that the reason is the execution of _get_blob() connecting to GCS?

[sww314]

@zisk0 Yes. get_blob connects to GCS. I do not think it should unless you need the file retrieved for writes, reads, etc.
Currently, it will make a call to verify the bucket exists as well (making it slower).

[zisk0]

AFAIK it is to obtain the public_url of the blob. We were working to control this URL using:

 def url(self, name):
    # Preserve the trailing slash after normalizing the path.
    name = self._normalize_name(clean_name(name))
    if self.base_url:
        return self.base_url + name
    else:
        blob = self._get_blob(self._encode_name(name))
        return blob.public_url

Where self.base_url is a setting:

class GoogleCloudStorage(Storage):
// ...
base_url = setting('GS_CDN_BASE_URL', None)

This is also a workaround for #385. Now load speed has been improved.

[jschneier]

All of this discussion is now ongoing in #491.