Django user-uploaded media files in production with Dokku

I would like to serve user uploaded media files using nginx on the same host as the Django application rather than a CDN or S3 or similar.

The django-private-storage library can be used to protect media files behind a login: https://github.com/edoburu/django-private-storage

I am deploying my Django application with Dokku.

Dokku says that dokku persistant storage plugin should be used to allow for user uploads to be persisted on the host. https://dokku.com/docs~v0.9.2/advanced-usage/persistent-storage/

My confusion is that django-private-storage requires you to edit the config for nginx. Specifically, it requires you to set the location of the private media being served to be internal. So that the URL cannot be accessed from the outside by a user who isn't logged in.

The dokku docs don't explain how to use persistant storage behind an application login. Do I actually need django-persistant-storage to be able to write user uploaded media?

How can I combine these solutions so that my application, which is inside a container, can read and write media files, which media files are served by nginx, and served at an internal location that can only be accessed by a user who is logged into the application?

Updates (Oct 2021) I am able to deploy my app, upload files and access them at the appropriate URL. But I haven't been able to protect them against unauthenticated access.

I haven't yet used django-private-storage or dokku persistant storage. Once the files are inaccessible I plan to follow these steps to allow authenticated access: https://b0uh.github.io/protect-django-media-files-per-user-basis-with-nginx.html

I created a file my_conf.conf saved to /home/dokku/backend/nginx.conf.d

which contains

location /protected/ {
    internal;
    alias /home/dokku/backend/;
}

and then rebooted Nginx

I can't actually see the images anywhere on host, but if I run dokku enter backend then my files are there in the container under '/mediafiles/testuploads/'

Here is settings.py

MEDIA_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'mediafiles')
MEDIA_URL = '/media/'

and models.py

class User(AbstractUser):
    profile_image = models.ImageField(upload_to='testuploads/', null=True)

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