Download a file with Django

Question

This might perhaps be a simple question, but I somehow just can not find the solution. Django offers a lot about uploading file, but how do I do to download a file.

Let's assume we have a button on HTML on uploads/something.txt as a file.

I tried with django.views.static.serve, however what this did it would open a file on webpage.

My question is simple: What is the best and most pythonic way for user of our website to download a file?

Answer 1

• You need to read that file.
• Serve it using HttpResponse along with proper content type.

Here's some sample code:

content = open("uploads/something.txt").read()
return HttpResponse(content, content_type='text/plain')

This should serve a text file.

But as you described, on some browser, it will not ask to download the file, rather, it would show it in the browser. If you want to show a download prompt, use this:

response = HttpResponse(open("uploads/something.txt", 'rb').read())
response['Content-Type'] = 'text/plain'
response['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename=DownloadedText.txt'
return response

However, please note that it might be a better idea to serve static contents or uploaded files via nginx or the reverse proxy of your choice. Sending large files through Django might not be the most optimum way of doing that.

Answer 2

import os
from django.conf import settings
from django.http import HttpResponse, Http404

def download(request, path):
    file_path = os.path.join(settings.MEDIA_ROOT, path)
    if os.path.exists(file_path):
        with open(file_path, 'rb') as fh:
            response = HttpResponse(fh.read(), content_type="application/vnd.ms-excel")
            response['Content-Disposition'] = 'inline; filename=' + os.path.basename(file_path)
            return response
    raise Http404