Django toplevel files

Simple Django app to manage a few admin-uploaded files intended to be available at the site root. Typically, those would be: /sitemap.xml and /robots.txt. It allows to avoid using SSH or FTP by site admins and integrates into Django admin interface with simple and flexible permissions scheme.

For more sophisticated way of managing this data, please look at django.contrib.sitemaps and django-robots.

Using it for some random arbitrary named files is not very practical, as this app mostly depends on the way your web server or project urlconf is setup. Note that app does not validate file path and allows to create a file within subdirectories adjacent to MEDIA_ROOT (such files are not very useful though).

Nobody can stop you using bare django.views.static.serve with a very relaxing urlconf and some hackish upload methods. If this sounds like your way, skip this app.

Usage

• Install with your favourite method (note, the app is not on PyPi yet).
• Add 'toplevel_files' to INSTALLED_APPS.
• Run manage.py syncdb or manage.py syncdb --migrate if you are using South.
• Configure your web server (the preferred way) and/or urlconf.
• Optionally setup permissions through 'django.contrib.auth' so that your users are allowed to add files, not file types.

Rationale

I don't think it is a good idea to use a django view to serve such files:

• Useful urlconf on a typical site for such a view would result in a database hit for every request or should be hardcoded.
• Big (lenghty) files download would block a valuable python process/thread.

Web server setup

Since, the intended usage is primarily serving a few known files within the server root, it is more practical to have a suitable config for that.

Let's assume:

• MEDIA_ROOT is something like '%s/media/uploads' % PROJECT_ROOT
• your web server root is at MEDIA_ROOT
• @django named location points where it should be (with fastcgi or uWSGI)

Here is Nginx example.

location ~* ^/(robots.txt|sitemap.xml)$ {
    access_log  off;
    try_files   /uploads/$uri  other_path/$uri  @django;
}

other_path/$uri can be used to provide scm-controlled location for those files.

See try_files directive for details.

Optional urlconf setup

Sometimes site urlconf is easier to edit than webserver's configuration. It is not recommended, but you can serve these static files with Django itself. To do so, just add something like this (probably at the top) to your project's ROOT_URLCONF:

(r'^(?P<filename>(robots\.txt|sitemap\.xml))/$', 'toplevel_files.views.serve')

Much less strict regexp can be used to match randomly named files typilcally used by site ownership verfification mechanizms: [a-z0-9]+\.(txt|xml|html)

Note:

• you'll still have to create apropriate file type with exact file name.
• a broad urlconf line placed on top may capture urls which you possibly expect to be handled with some other apps (django.contrib.sitemaps, for example).

The view checks if requested filename matches existing TopLevelFile object and tries to read the file from disc. See this app's code and official Django documentation on serving static files.

Internals

The app contains two models tied with one-to-one relationship: one to hold the file type and the other with the actual file field. This is done to separate permissions, so that only privileged users might create new file types (paths, essentially).

• Once the file is uploaded, it is not possible to change it's type via admin.
• App subclasses django.core.files.storage.FileSystemStorage.
• Admin actions are disabled for app's models, since they skip custom method we use to actually delete the file itself.
• Updating an existing file would overwrite the target (unlike Django's default, wchich gives new file a unique non-conflicting name). This is what makes the app really useful.

Compatibility

Using such web server setup ensures the Django would receive the request, if there was no corresponding file found. This way you can use other apps to manage those URLs and still being able to intercept requests with web server's custom location processing.

Note on development server

It's likely, you do not use real web server with fancy configs on your development machine. Refer to urlconf setup if you want to check the app works as expected during development.