Having Django serve downloadable files

Question

I want users on the site to be able to download files whose paths are obscured so they cannot be directly downloaded   For instance  I d like the URL to be something like this  http   example com download  f somefile txt  And on the server  I know that all downloadable files reside in the folder  home user files    Is there a way to make Django serve that file for download as opposed to trying to find a URL and View to display it

User · Answer

Just mentioning the FileResponse object available in Django 1.10

Edit: Just ran into my own answer while searching for an easy way to stream files via Django, so here is a more complete example (to future me). It assumes that the FileField name is imported_file

views.py

from django.views.generic.detail import DetailView   
from django.http import FileResponse
class BaseFileDownloadView(DetailView):
  def get(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
    filename=self.kwargs.get('filename', None)
    if filename is None:
      raise ValueError("Found empty filename")
    some_file = self.model.objects.get(imported_file=filename)
    response = FileResponse(some_file.imported_file, content_type="text/csv")
    # https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.11/howto/outputting-csv/#streaming-large-csv-files
    response['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename="%s"'%filename
    return response

class SomeFileDownloadView(BaseFileDownloadView):
    model = SomeModel

urls.py

...
url(r'^somefile/(?P<filename>[-\w_\\-\\.]+)$', views.SomeFileDownloadView.as_view(), name='somefile-download'),
...

User · Answer

Django recommend that you use another server to serve static media  another server running on the same machine is fine   They recommend the use of such servers as lighttp    This is very simple to set up  However  if  somefile txt  is generated on request  content is dynamic  then you may want django to serve it   Django Docs - Static Files

User · Answer

Try  https   pypi python org pypi django-sendfile    Abstraction to offload file uploads to web-server  e g  Apache with mod xsendfile  once Django has checked permissions etc

User · Answer

I did a project on this  You can look at my github repo   https   github com nishant-boro django-rest-framework-download-expert  This module provides a simple way to serve files for download in django rest framework using Apache module Xsendfile  It also has an additional feature of serving downloads only to users belonging to a particular group

User · Answer

def qrcodesave request        import urllib2         url   http   chart apis google com chart cht qr amp chs 300x300 amp chl s amp chld H 0        opener   urllib2 urlopen url         content type    application octet-stream      response   HttpResponse opener read    content type content type      response  Content-Disposition     attachment  filename aktel png      return response

User · Answer

You should use sendfile apis given by popular servers like apache or nginx in production  Many years i was using sendfile api of these servers for protecting files  Then created a simple middleware based django app for this purpose suitable for both development  amp  production purpose You can access the source code here  UPDATE  in new version python provider uses django FileResponse if available and also adds support for many server implementations from lighthttp  caddy to hiawatha Usage pip install django-fileprovider   add fileprovider app to INSTALLED APPS settings  add fileprovider middleware FileProviderMiddleware to MIDDLEWARE CLASSES settings set FILEPROVIDER NAME settings to nginx or apache in production  by default it is python for development purpose   in your classbased or function views set response header X-File value to absolute path to the file  For example  def hello request           code to check or protect the file from unauthorized access    response   HttpResponse        response  X-File       absolute path to file       return response    django-fileprovider impemented in a way that your code will need only minimum modification  Nginx configuration To protect file from direct access you can set the configuration as  location  files      internal    root    home sideffect0 secret files       Here nginx sets a location url  files  only access internaly  if you are using above configuration you can set X-File as  response  X-File       files filename extension    By doing this with nginx configuration  the file will be protected  amp  also you can control the file from django views

User · Answer

S Lott has the  good  simple solution  and elo80ka has the  best  efficient solution   Here is a  better  middle solution - no server setup  but more efficient for large files than the naive fix   http   djangosnippets org snippets 365   Basically  Django still handles serving the file but does not load the whole thing into memory at once   This allows your server to  slowly  serve a big file without ramping up the memory usage   Again  S Lott s X-SendFile is still better for larger files   But if you can t or don t want to bother with that  then this middle solution will gain you better efficiency without the hassle

User · Answer

I have faced the same problem more then once and so implemented using xsendfile module and auth view decorators the django-filelibrary  Feel free to use it as inspiration for your own solution    https   github com danielsokolowski django-filelibrary

User · Answer

For a very simple but not efficient or scalable solution  you can just use the built in django serve view  This is excellent for quick prototypes or one-off work  but as has been mentioned throughout this question  you should use something like apache or nginx in production   from django views static import serve filepath     some path to local file txt  return serve request  os path basename filepath   os path dirname filepath

User · Answer

Another project to have a look at  http   readthedocs org docs django-private-files en latest usage html Looks promissing  haven t tested it myself yet tho   Basically the project abstracts the mod xsendfile configuration and allows you to do things like   from django db import models from django contrib auth models import User from private files import PrivateFileField  def is owner request  instance       return  not request user is anonymous    and request user is authenticated and                    instance owner pk   request user pk  class FileSubmission models Model       description   models CharField  description   max length   200          owner   models ForeignKey User      uploaded file   PrivateFileField  file   upload to    uploads   condition   is owner

User · Answer

It was mentioned above that the mod xsendfile method does not allow for non-ASCII characters in filenames   For this reason  I have a patch available for mod xsendfile that will allow any file to be sent  as long as the name is url encoded  and the additional header   X-SendFile-Encoding  url   Is sent as well   http   ben timby com  p 149

User · Answer

Providing protected access to static html folder using https   github com johnsensible django-sendfile  https   gist github com iutinvg 9907731

User · Answer

Tried  Rocketmonkeys solution but downloaded files were being stored as   bin and given random names  That s not fine of course  Adding another line from  elo80ka solved the problem  Here is the code I m using now   from wsgiref util import FileWrapper from django http import HttpResponse  filename     home stackoverflow-addict private-folder not-porn  image jpg  wrapper   FileWrapper file filename   response   HttpResponse wrapper  content type  text plain   response  Content-Disposition      attachment  filename  s    os path basename filename  response  Content-Length     os path getsize filename  return response   You can now store files in a private directory  not inside  media nor  public html  and expose them via django to certain users or under certain circumstances  Hope it helps   Thanks to  elo80ka   S Lott and  Rocketmonkeys for the answers  got the perfect solution combining all of them

User · Answer

For the  best of both worlds  you could combine S Lott s solution with the xsendfile module  django generates the path to the file  or the file itself   but the actual file serving is handled by Apache Lighttpd  Once you ve set up mod xsendfile  integrating with your view takes a few lines of code   from django utils encoding import smart str  response   HttpResponse mimetype  application force-download     mimetype is replaced by content type for django 1 7 response  Content-Disposition      attachment  filename  s    smart str file name  response  X-Sendfile     smart str path to file    It s usually a good idea to set the  Content-Length  header too    You can also set any other required headers  Cache-Control  etc  return response   Of course  this will only work if you have control over your server  or your hosting company has mod xsendfile already set up   EDIT      mimetype is replaced by content type for django 1 7   response   HttpResponse content type  application force-download       EDIT   For nginx check this  it uses X-Accel-Redirect instead of apache X-Sendfile header

User · Answer

A  download  is simply an HTTP header change   See http   docs djangoproject com en dev ref request-response  telling-the-browser-to-treat-the-response-as-a-file-attachment for how to respond with a download   You only need one URL definition for   download    The request s GET or POST dictionary will have the  f somefile txt  information   Your view function will simply merge the base path with the  f  value  open the file  create and return a response object   It should be less than 12 lines of code

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