Having Django serve downloadable files

Question

I want users on the site to be able to download files whose paths are obscured so they cannot be directly downloaded.

For instance, I\'d like the URL to be something

Answer 1

I have faced the same problem more then once and so implemented using xsendfile module and auth view decorators the django-filelibrary. Feel free to use it as inspiration for your own solution.

https://github.com/danielsokolowski/django-filelibrary

Answer 2

For a very simple but not efficient or scalable solution, you can just use the built in django serve view. This is excellent for quick prototypes or one-off work, but as has been mentioned throughout this question, you should use something like apache or nginx in production.

from django.views.static import serve
filepath = '/some/path/to/local/file.txt'
return serve(request, os.path.basename(filepath), os.path.dirname(filepath))

Answer 3

Tried @Rocketmonkeys solution but downloaded files were being stored as *.bin and given random names. That's not fine of course. Adding another line from @elo80ka solved the problem.
Here is the code I'm using now:

from wsgiref.util import FileWrapper
from django.http import HttpResponse

filename = "/home/stackoverflow-addict/private-folder(not-porn)/image.jpg"
wrapper = FileWrapper(file(filename))
response = HttpResponse(wrapper, content_type='text/plain')
response['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename=%s' % os.path.basename(filename)
response['Content-Length'] = os.path.getsize(filename)
return response

You can now store files in a private directory (not inside /media nor /public_html) and expose them via django to certain users or under certain circumstances.
Hope it helps.

Thanks to @elo80ka, @S.Lott and @Rocketmonkeys for the answers, got the perfect solution combining all of them =)