How do I serve a text file from Django?

Question

I am writing a Django based website, but need to serve a a simple text file. Is the correct way to so this by putting it in the static directory and bypassing Django?

Answer 1

I agree with @luc, however another alternative is to use X-Accel-Redirect header.

Imagine that you have to serve big protected (have to login to view it) static files. If you put the file in static directory, then it's access is open and anybody can view it. If you serve it in Django by opening the file and then serving it, there is too much IO and Django will use more RAM since it has to load the file into RAM. The solution is to have a view, which will authenticate a user against a database, however instead of returning a file, Django will add X-Accel-Redirect header to it's response. Now since Django is behind nginx, nginx will see this header and it will then serve the protected static file. That's much better because nginx is much better and much faste at serving static files compared to Django. Here are nginx docs on how to do that. You can also do a similar thing in Apache, however I don't remember the header.

Answer 2

I had a similar requirement for getting a text template for a form via AJAX. I choose to implement it with a model based view (Django 1.6.1) like this:

from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.views.generic import View
from django.views.generic.detail import SingleObjectMixin

from .models import MyModel

class TextFieldView(SingleObjectMixin, View):
    model = MyModel

    def get(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        myinstance = self.get_object()
        content = myinstance.render_text_content()
        return HttpResponse(content, content_type='text/plain; charset=utf8')

The rendered text is quite small and dynamically generated from other fields in the model.

Answer 3

If the file is static (not generated by the django app) then you can put it in the static directory.

If the content of this file is generated by Django then you can return it in a HttpResponse with text/plain as mimetype.

content = 'any string generated by django'
return HttpResponse(content, content_type='text/plain')

You can also give a name to the file by setting the Content-Disposition of the response.

filename = "my-file.txt"
content = 'any string generated by django'
response = HttpResponse(content, content_type='text/plain')
response['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename={0}'.format(filename)
return response