Referencing file in Django views.py

Question

I am building a Django web interface (overkill - I know!) for a few small python functions. One of these transforms a txt file stored in Django root. Well it aims to.

I have the following setup in a few places:

with open('file.csv','r') as source:
...

However, without setting the entire directory on my machine (eg /home/...), it cannot find the file. I have tried putting this in the Static directory (as ideally I would like people to be able to download the file at a later stage) but same problem.

How do you work with files within Django? What is best practice to solve the above allowing someone to download it later?

Answer 1

If you only need the path:

import os
from django.conf import settings

file_path = os.path.join(settings.STATIC_ROOT, 'file.txt')

with open(file_path, 'r') as source:
    # do stuff

• Please notice that you need to put your file in a directory like this: my_app/static/my_app/file.txt

for more information you can refer to Django docs .