I am able to access the static file in question via direct url (localhost:8000/static/maps/foo.txt), so I guess I have it all working well. But I can't do the following: I want to open that text file in views.py. It's because I'm working on a simple web browser adventure game and I wanted to store maps in static/maps and load those maps using f=open('/static/maps/' + mapname + '.txt', 'r'). I get the IOError: no such file or directory. I really don't understand it, because there is such directory when I search for it in address.
Can it be done somehow?
You need to use the place they are stored on disk, which is probably in settings.STATIC_ROOT or settings.STATICFILES_DIRS, not the place they are being served by the web app.
Note however that if you are modifying these files programmatically, they aren't (by definition) static files. You'd be better off using the MEDIA_ROOT location. Also note that Django has helpers to do this sort of thing - see the documentation on Managing files.
Related
I want to create the file(.wav) by django and let it be downloaded by user.
Currently I create the file under /myproj/static directory.
However it is mixed with the other jpg/img files, so,, it's not good design?
then, I read the document about /myproj/media directory but it is said used for user upload files.
So,,, how is the good directory design for server created file?
Should I create such as /myproj/create_wav?
but how can user access this url in template?
Thank you for any idea or helps.
According to Django's documentation,
By default, Django stores files locally, using the MEDIA_ROOT and MEDIA_URL settings. (...) However, Django provides ways to write custom file storage systems that allow you to completely customize where and how Django stores files.
So, in OP's shoes I'd simply use the media folder, since that's used not only for user uploads but also for user downloads.
Django currently has a complete system for routing urls.
But I have a very specific situation where I am using django but actually need to use urls like in classic PHP language.
For example:
The url - localhost/reader/theeffort should take me to a folder called theeffort where I have my files index.html, 1.html, 2.html, 3.html
and so on!
Now all these files should be accessible by localhost/reader/theeffort/*.html and not by Django's default url system. Is this possible to achieve that? If yes, how?
This isn't a thing you would do with Django's URLs. If you just want to serve HTML files within a folder, they are static files; they should therefore be served by the web server itself, eg Apache. You just need to configure an alias in the Apache conf to point to the folder where the static files are.
I am working on a django project that provides an API to generate thumbnails of images, and the basic logic is like the following:
when the source image URL comes for the first time, the django would do some sort of image manipulation, and return the thumbnail image
when the same image URL comes again, django would simply serve the previous thumbnail image (stored as static media) again.
basically, case 2 happened much often than case 1. Now I used django to serve the images all the time, which I believe is a bad practice.
I wonder if it's possible to do a better way of image serving for case 2? For example, is there some sort of way to ask django to send proxy requests to apache and ask apache to serve the file?
I know I could use HTTP redirect to do that, but that seems to generate too much redirect requests on the client side (one HTML page would contain a lot of links to this API).
thx.
The simplest solution of the top of my head would be to use an Apache rewrite rule with a condition.
RewriteCond %(REQUEST_URI) ^media
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule #Some rewrite rule to redirect from '/media/filename' to '/image_generator/filename'
This basically just checks to see whether the file exists in the media directory, and if it doesn't it sends the user to the image generator, which can then generate and save the file to /media where it can be found for the next request.
NB: I've never actually tried this sort of redirection with Django, so it may need some measure of tweaking..
For example, is there some sort of way to ask django to send proxy requests to apache and ask apache to serve the file?
You have that exactly backwards.
Read the Django deployment guide. https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/howto/deployment/modwsgi/#serving-files
Apache should be serving all static files (images, for example) all the time. Always.
Django should never, ever serve an image file (or a .css or .js or anything other than .html).
See later part of this section in documentation:
http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/wiki/ConfigurationGuidelines#The_Apache_Alias_Directive
Using Alias/AddHandler/mod_rewrite allows Django to overlay static files in filesystem. In other words, static files take precedence.
When localising Django application the makemessages command simply parses all the TXT, HTML and PY files and generates PO files for them but when localising JS files, you need to run the djangojs command. I haven't delved into the Django source to figure out why this done differently. Could someone explain?
I've read that in production environments, Apache is used to serve the application files while a simple proxy like Nginx is used to serve static files as this greatly reduces the load on the application server. With this scenario, I guess it works like this: when rendering a template, Django checks the requested locale, loads the appropriate localisation file and serves the template but JS on the other hand being served as static media doesn't get parsed by Django. Is this it?
(Its my first foray in to the world of localisation with Django and I'm packed full of question, many of who's answers I can't seem to find and therefore this post.)
Thanks
The reason why it's handled differently is in the docs.
Adding translations to JavaScript poses some problems:
JavaScript code doesn't have access to a gettext implementation.
JavaScript code doesn't have access to .po or .mo files; they need to be delivered by the server.
The translation catalogs for JavaScript should be kept as small as possible.
So essentially, the internal Python translation is done on the server. But for JS, there's another file served by the server, which contains all the required translations for user's language. And the translation is done on the user's side. So as you can see, it's a completely different strategy. Django helps by adding similar interface for JS files, even though they're handled in a completely different way.
I guess it works like this: when rendering a template, Django checks
the requested locale, loads the appropriate localisation file and
serves the template but JS on the other hand being served as static
media doesn't get parsed by Django. Is this it?
You are right in the first part, about handling templates. Handling JS works as I've explained above.
Note that Django JS translation mechanism, doesn't treat JS translations as static files. It uses a Django view to generate the JS file everytime (javascript_catalog mentioned in the docs linked in the first line).
That is one of the problems I've encountered. Such files don't need to be generated on every request. There are some projects that actually let you pack those JS translations as static files and enable you to cache them properly (like django-mediagenerator).
I currently have a django app which generates PDFs and saves them to a specific directory. From the admin interface I want to have some way to view the list of files within that directory (similar to models.FilePathField()), but also be able to download them. I realize that django was never intended to actually serve files, and I have been tinkering with django-sendfile, as a possible option. It just doesn't seem like there is any way to create a dynamic list of files other than with FilePathField (which I don't believe can suite my purposes).
Would this project fit your needs? http://code.google.com/p/django-filebrowser/
I ended up realizing that I was going about the problem in a more complicated manner than was necessary. Using two separate views trivializes the issue. I was just under the impression that the admin interface would include such a basic feature.
What I did was create a download_list view to display the files in the directory, and a download_file view which uses django-sendfile to serve the file to the end-user. Download_file simply parses through the directory with listdir(), checks if the extension is valid and sends the complete file path to the download_file function (after the user selects one).
Are the files in a directory that is served by your webserver? If all you want to do is list and download the files, it may be easier just to have a link to the directory with all the files in it and let the webserver take care of listing and serving the files. I understand this may not be the ideal solution for you, but it does avoid having Django serve static files, which is a task best left to the webserver.