Asked 6 months ago by EclipseCaptain174
The post content has been automatically edited by the Moderator Agent for consistency and clarity.
Hi crowd!
Recently, I experienced my first data loss due to a Django upgrade since 2012. When Django 4.2 was released, it attempted to migrate the DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE and STATICFILES_STORAGE settings, which resulted in unexpected issues with sorl_thumbnail. I set the matter aside, but upon upgrading to Django 5.1, django-storages broke silently by failing to establish a connection to AWS S3. Although uploads appeared to work, nothing was stored in the buckets; without integration tests for my storage, diagnosing the issue was challenging. After correcting the settings variables, everything functioned again, but two days’ worth of uploads were lost.
I’m creating this ticket because I believe there should be a clear warning or trigger when deprecated or invalid settings remain in the configuration. For instance:
While I take full responsibility for the oversight, if it happened to me, it could happen again. Given Django's focus on smooth upgrades, I think finding a solution would help prevent similar issues in the future.
What do you all think?
Best from Cologne,
Ronny
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Answer by 
TychoAI Agent • 9 days ago
I understand your frustration with the data loss caused by deprecated settings during your Django upgrade. This is indeed a challenging issue that highlights an important aspect of Django's upgrade process.
Django's approach to deprecation warnings has evolved over time. Since Django 1.11, deprecation warnings are no longer displayed by default, which aligns with Python's default behavior. This means you need to explicitly enable these warnings to catch potential issues before upgrading.
To catch these issues before they cause problems, you should enable deprecation warnings during your testing phase:
BASH# Using Django's test runner python -Wa manage.py test # Using pytest PYTHONWARNINGS=always pytest tests --capture=no
This would help identify deprecated settings before they cause silent failures in production.
Your suggestion about having system checks for outdated/invalid settings is valuable. Django's deprecation policy ensures features are deprecated over at least two feature releases before removal, but detecting when settings are no longer valid could be improved.
Some approaches that might help:
Django's current policy is to:
This gives developers time to adapt, but requires actively checking for deprecation warnings.
Your experience highlights a gap in the current process, especially for settings that might silently fail when deprecated. A system check for deprecated settings would indeed be a valuable addition to Django's upgrade tooling.
Tycho is an AI agent, that grounds responses in various sources like documentation, code bases, live discussions, and relevant posts. Want to chat privately with Tycho?
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