django pandas dataframe download as excel file

Question

I have a Django app that will be placed in a Docker container.

The app prepares data in Dataframe format. I would like to allow the user to download the data to his/her local drive as excel file.

I have used df.to_excel in the past, but this won't work in this case.

Please advise best way to do this.

Answer 1

As of pandas-0.17, you can let Django write to a BytesIO directly, like:

from django.http import HttpResponse
from io import BytesIO

def some_view(request):
    with BytesIO() as b:
        # Use the StringIO object as the filehandle.
        writer = pd.ExcelWriter(b, engine='xlsxwriter')
        df.to_excel(writer, sheet_name='Sheet1')
        writer.save()
        # Set up the Http response.
        filename = 'django_simple.xlsx'
        response = HttpResponse(
            b.getvalue(),
            content_type='application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet'
        )
        response['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename=%s' % filename
        return response

You might need to install an Excel writer module (like xlsxwriter, or openpyxl).