Media files - Settings

#100 words#django#media files

Series: Static and media files

  1. Static and media files
  2. Static files - Settings
  3. Media files - Settings
  4. Static and Media when deployed
  5. Storage Backends - what are they?

Today is turn of media file settings and dealing with file uploads in general. First, the settings required for development are as follows:

MEDIA_URL = 'media/'
MEDIA_ROOT = BASE_DIR / 'media_root'

MEDIA_URL defines the public facing url for where media files are served from. MEDIA_ROOT defines where uploaded files are stored within the context of the project, for local development a folder in the project is an excellent start.

Finally when it comes to uploading files there are a few things to note.

  1. Using a FileField or ImageField are default ways to save files into a model.
  2. If your using a Django Form, then be sure to pass in request.FILES as well as request.POST when instaniating the form
  3. When constructing the HTML form in a template be sure to mark the enctype as "multipart/form-data". See the example below.
<form method="POST" enctype="multipart/form-data">
    {% csrf_token %}
    {{ form }}
    <input type="submit" value="Upload File" />
</form>

Tomorrow we will look at static files and media files when deploying a Django project.

Tomorrow