django-drf-filepond: A filepond server implementation for Django + Django REST Framework

django-drf-filepond is a Django app that provides a filepond server-side implementation for Django/Django REST Framework projects. The app can be easily added to your Django projects to provide a server-side API for the filepond file upload library.

Further documentation and a tutorial are available at https://django-drf-filepond.readthedocs.io.

Installation

The app can be installed from PyPi:

pip install django-drf-filepond

or add it to your list of dependencies in a requirements.txt file.

Configuration

There are three key configuration updates to make within your Django application to set up django-drf-filepond:

1. Add the app to INSTALLED_APPS:

Add 'django-drf-filepond' to INSTALLED_APPS in your Django settings file (e.g. settings.py):

...

INSTALLED_APPS = [
	...,
	'django_drf_filepond'
]

...

2. Set the temporary file upload location:

Set the location where you want django-drf-filepond to store temporary file uploads by adding the DJANGO_DRF_FILEPOND_UPLOAD_TMP configuration variable to your settings file, e.g.:

import os
...
DJANGO_DRF_FILEPOND_UPLOAD_TMP = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'filepond-temp-uploads')
...

3. Include the app urls into your main url configuration

Add the URL mappings for django-drf-filepond to your URL configuration in urls.py:

from django.conf.urls import url, include

urlpatterns = [
	...
	url(r'^fp/', include('django_drf_filepond.urls')),
]

On the client side, you need to set the endpoints of the process, revert, fetch, load and restore functions to match the endpoint used in your path statement above. For example if the first parameter to url is fp/ then the endpoint for the process function will be /fp/process/.

Working with file uploads

When a file is uploaded from a filepond client, the file is placed into a uniquely named directory within the temporary upload directory specified by the DJANGO_DRF_FILEPOND_UPLOAD_TMP parameter. As per the filepond server spec, the server returns a unique identifier for the file upload. In this case, the identifier is a 22-character unique ID generated using the shortuuid library. This ID is the name used for the directory created under DJANGO_DRF_FILEPOND_UPLOAD_TMP into which the file is placed. At present, the file also has a separate unique identifier which hides the original name of the file on the server filesystem. The original filename is stored within the django-drf-filepond app's database.

When/if the client subsequently submits the form associated with the filepond instance that triggered the upload, the unique directory ID will be passed and this can be used to look up the temporary file:

import os
from django_drf_filepond.models import TemporaryUpload

# Get the temporary upload record
tu = TemporaryUpload.objects.get(upload_id='<22-char unique ID>')

# Move the file somewhere for permanent storage
# The file will be saved with its original name
os.rename(tu.get_file_path(), '/path/to/permanent/location/%s' % tu.upload_name)

# Delete the temporary upload record and the temporary directory
tu.delete()