How do I serve a text file from Django? - 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

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

Answer 2

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 3

I was using a more complex method until recently, then I discovered this and this:
path('file.txt', TemplateView.as_view(template_name='file.txt',
content_type='text/plain')),
Then put file.txt in the root of your templates directory in your Django project.
I'm now using this method for robots.txt, a text file like the original asker, and a pre-generated sitemap.xml (eg, change to content_type='text/xml').
Unless I'm missing something, this is pretty simple and powerful.

Answer 4

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.