title: Django, boto, S3 and easy_thumbnails not working in production environment
body: <p>I'm using Django, django-storages with S3 (boto) in combination with easy-thumbnails. On my local machine, everything works as expected: if the thumbnail doesn't exists, it gets created and upload to S3 and saves in the easy-thumbnails database tables. But the problem is, when I push the code to my production server, it doesn't work, easy-thumbnails output an empty image SRC.</p>
  
  <p>What I already noticed is that when I create the thumbnails on my local machine, the easy-thumbnail path uses backward slashes and my Linux server needs forwards slashes. If I change the slashes in the database, the thumbnails are showed on my Linux machine, but it is still not able to generate thumbnails on the Linux (production) machine.</p>
  
  <p>The simple django-storages test fails:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; import django
  &gt;&gt;&gt; from django.core.files.storage import default_storage
  &gt;&gt;&gt; file = default_storage.open('storage_test', 'w')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Output:
  django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: Requested setting DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE, but settings are not configured. You must either define the environment variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE or call settings.configure() before accessing settings.</p>
  
  <p>If I do:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; from base.settings import staging
  &gt;&gt;&gt; from django.conf import settings
  &gt;&gt;&gt; settings.configure(staging)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This works (I have a <code>settings</code> directory with 4 settings files: base.py, staging.py, development.py and production.py)</p>
  
  <p>It seems that on my production server, the config file isn't loaded properly (however the rest of the website works fine). If I add <code>THUMBNAIL_DEBUG = True</code> to my settings file, but easy-thumbnails' debugging still doesn't work (it does work on my local machine).</p>
  
  <p>What can be te problem? I've been debugging for 10+ hours already.</p>