Serving a django static text file

Question

I have a text file in the static folder in my project root.

I'd like to serve it so I've created:

@csrf_exempt
def display_text(request):

    content = 
    return HttpResponse(content, content_type='text/plain; charset=utf8')

How do I set the path to the textfile, or how do I read it in to 'content', so that I can display it.

If it's in the static folder, why ask Django to serve it at all? It will be served by whatever is serving the rest of your static files, like the JS and CSS. — Daniel Roseman, Jun 11 '15 at 21:21
Thanks for looking at it Daniel, I'm planning to deploy this to Heroku, where I don't have complete control of the environment. I assumed that I couldn't serve directly. Is there a way to do this? — user1592380, Jun 11 '15 at 22:30
I don't see why you need any special control. As I say, if it's in your static folder it will get served in exactly the same way as your images, stylesheets and JavaScript files. — Daniel Roseman, Jun 11 '15 at 22:54

score 5 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:31

5

Have a look at this question that lets Apache handle the file delivery with mod_xsendfile.

If you insist on having Django itself delivering the file, you could do the following:

from django.http import StreamingHttpResponse

@csrf_exempt
def display_text(request):
    content = open('/your/file', 'r').read()
    response = StreamingHttpResponse(content)
    response['Content-Type'] = 'text/plain; charset=utf8'
    return response

edited May 23 '17 at 12:31

Community

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1

answered Jun 11 '15 at 21:06

mimo

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Thanks for showing me how to do it. I ended up following https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/django-assets, which showed me how to serve the assets on heroku – user1592380 Jun 12 '15 at 16:06

Serving a django static text file

1 Answers1