[Answer]-How should I set up my dev enviornment for a django app so that I can pull on static s3 files?

Its good to have different settings for production and dev.
So you can just create a settings folder and have settings may be prod.py and dev.py. this will let you use diff apps for eg: you actually don’t need debug tool bar on prod.

And regarding the file, I feel you dont have to worry about the structure as such, you can always refer to Etag and get the file (md5 hash of the object)