List directory file contents in a Django template

Question

I'm just learning Python & Django. (Thanks to everyone who contributes here -- it's been an invaluable resource!)

One seemingly basic thing that I'm having trouble with is rendering a simple list of static files (say the contents of a single repository directory on my server) as a list of downloadable links. Whether this is secure or not is another question, but suppose I want to do it...

This post helped steer me in the right direction: Python directory list returned to Django template

This code snippet outputs the filenames in 'myfiles' if run from a prompt:

path= os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__))  
myfiles = os.path.join(path, 'myfiles')  
os.chdir(myfiles)  
for files in os.listdir("."):
     print files  

But how do I pass these files to a Django template and generate a list of links? I think I may have to create a Python dictionary/tuple of some sort to make it iterable, pass it as a template variable and render it in a for loop?

Do I have to add an entry to my urls.py file to make this work? Something like this?

(r'^myfiles/(?P<path>.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve', {'document_root': os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'myfiles'), 'show_indexes': True}),

Thanks for your help! I'm just learning and I couldn't really figure out how to do this from existing code snippets online.

EDIT: This is what I've got in my views.py: (you'll notice from the '\\' that I'm on a Windows system)

def myfiles_page(request):
    path = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__))
    myfiles = os.path.join(path, 'myfiles\\')
    os.chdir(myfiles)
    x = 0
    d = {}
    for file in os.listdir("."):
        d[x] = (myfiles + file)
        x = x + 1

    variables = RequestContext(request, {
    'user' : request.user,
    'filedict' : d,
    })
    return render_to_response('myfiles_page.html', variables)

This is how I was trying to get it to display in a template: (according to the Django documentation)

{% for key, value in filedict %}
    {{ key }}: {{ value }}
{% endfor %}

But 'filedict' is still not displaying anything in the template. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Something very much not like that, I reckon.

You'll probably need to create a function of your own inside views.py - see tutorial.

That function will get the file list from os.listdir into a list.

Pass that list in the context to a template and do render_to_response with a template you've written - see tutorial.

In the template, its then something like:

{% for file in filelist %}
  {{ file }}
{% endfor %}

You can pass anything in the context to a template. You might want to pass an augmented list of files with URLs too - a list of dicts, where each dict has a name and a url. Then your template is:

{% for file in filelist %}
  <a href="{{file.url}}">{{ file.name }}</a>
{% endfor %}

BIG FAT SECURITY WARNING

Don't let users browse files by letting them put a path in a URL, at least not without really really checking that they can't do stuff like /myfiles/../../notmyfiles/secret.txt and see other peoples files just by sticking dot-dots in the path to go upwards.

If you dont understand that, then you probably shouldn't be coding this up on anything but a toy system that you don't mind being ripped to pieces!