How to post a file to django WITHOUT using html form

Question

I'm currently trying to post a file to a service endpoint, written in django.

I can find a bunch of examples like this (exert from here):

def upload_file(request):
    if request.method == 'POST':
        form = UploadFileForm(request.POST, request.FILES)
        if form.is_valid():
            handle_uploaded_file(request.FILES['file'])
            return HttpResponseRedirect('/success/url/')
     ........

but how do I make a request using either the test client or urllib which can pass files to the server when it isn't coming from an HTML form? I'm currently trying to urlencode the file contents into a json string and then pass that along; but that is proving to be cumbersome.

IN ADDITION TO ANSWER BELOW:

Don't forget to make your service csrf exempt
Don't set the content type or set it explicitly to multipart.
Consult this for info on how to handle incoming files in your view.

I recommend this library docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/index.html — Goin
– Goin, Commented Jul 25, 2012 at 21:55

pat34515 · Accepted Answer · 2012-07-25 22:11:15Z

1

As Goin says, with Requests, you could do this:

>>> r = requests.post('https://api.github.com/user', auth=('user', 'pass'))
>>> r.status_code
200
>>> r.headers['content-type']
'application/json; charset=utf8'
>>> r.encoding
'utf-8'
>>> r.text
u'{"type":"User"...'
>>> r.json
{u'private_gists': 419, u'total_private_repos': 77, ...}

This in urllib2 would be:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import urllib2

gh_url = 'https://api.github.com'

req = urllib2.Request(gh_url)

password_manager = urllib2.HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultRealm()
password_manager.add_password(None, gh_url, 'user', 'pass')

auth_manager = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler(password_manager)
opener = urllib2.build_opener(auth_manager)

urllib2.install_opener(opener)

handler = urllib2.urlopen(req)

print handler.getcode()
print handler.headers.getheader('content-type')

Source: github

Posting a multipart-encoded file would be easy in requests. From the official docs:

>>> url = '/your/recieving/end'
>>> files = {'report.xls': open('report.xls', 'rb')}

>>> r = requests.post(url, files=files)
>>> r.text # response json

edited Jul 25, 2012 at 22:11

answered Jul 25, 2012 at 21:59

pat34515

1,97912 silver badges13 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

5 Comments

Dave Over a year ago

How could I use this to post a file/contents of a file to a django service? Also, what would the view look like which parses the file from the response?

pat34515 Over a year ago

Sadly, I don't know django much :( .. but check my update to the answer. Is that the kind of thing you're looking for?

Dave Over a year ago

I think you've gotten me closer. I didn't know about the openers in urllib2, so I'm looking into that now.

Dave Over a year ago

Actually, I think I get it know. I'll give it a shot and accept assuming it works for me.

Dave Over a year ago

Thanks again! I've updated my answer with a little extra info needed to tie all of this together but it works like a charm.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

How to post a file to django WITHOUT using html form

1 Answer 1

5 Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

5 Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related