Book Image

Web Development with Django - Second Edition

By : Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Chris Guest, Bharath Chandra K S
4.7 (3)
Book Image

Web Development with Django - Second Edition

4.7 (3)
By: Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Chris Guest, Bharath Chandra K S

Overview of this book

Do you want to develop reliable and secure applications that stand out from the crowd without spending hours on boilerplate code? You’ve made the right choice trusting the Django framework, and this book will tell you why. Often referred to as a “batteries included” web development framework, Django comes with all the core features needed to build a standalone application. Web Development with Django will take you through all the essential concepts and help you explore its power to build real-world applications using Python. Throughout the book, you’ll get the grips with the major features of Django by building a website called Bookr – a repository for book reviews. This end-to-end case study is split into a series of bitesize projects presented as exercises and activities, allowing you to challenge yourself in an enjoyable and attainable way. As you advance, you'll acquire various practical skills, including how to serve static files to add CSS, JavaScript, and images to your application, how to implement forms to accept user input, and how to manage sessions to ensure a reliable user experience. You’ll cover everyday tasks that are part of the development cycle of a real-world web application. By the end of this Django book, you'll have the skills and confidence to creatively develop and deploy your own projects.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

Serving uploaded (and other) files using Django

Throughout this chapter and Chapter 5, Serving Static Files, we have discouraged serving files using Django. This is because it would needlessly tie up a Python process just serving a file – something that the webserver is capable of handling. Unfortunately, web servers do not usually provide dynamic access control, that is, allowing only authenticated users to download a file. Depending on your web server used in production, you might be able to have it authenticate against Django and then serve the file itself; however, the specific configuration of specific web servers is outside the scope of this book.

One approach you can take is to specify a subdirectory of your MEDIA_ROOT directory and have your web server prevent access to just this specific folder. Any protected media should be stored inside it. If you do this, only Django will be able to read the files inside. For example, your web server could serve everything in...