Read a local file in django

Question

I'm quite stuck on this one! I am writing a Django view that reads data from an external database. To do this, I am using the standard MySQLdb library. Now, to load the data, I must do a very long and complex query. I can hard code that query in my view and that works just fine. But I think that is not practical; I want to be able to change the query in the future, so I try to load the statement from a text file. My problem is that I don't know where to store and how to open that file. Wherever I do, I get a "No such file or directory" error. Even saving it in the same directory than the code of the view fails.

Note that this is not an uploaded file; it's just an external file that completes my code. Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Keep the file in django project root and add the following in the settings.py file.

PROJECT_ROOT = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__)) 

Then in the view do this.

import os from django.conf.settings import PROJECT_ROOT  file_ = open(os.path.join(PROJECT_ROOT, 'filename')) 

Update:

In newer Django versions BASE_DIR is already defined in the settings.py file. So you can do the following.

import os from django.conf import settings  file_ = open(os.path.join(settings.BASE_DIR, 'filename'))