django-uuid-upload-path

django-uuid-upload-path generates short UUIDs to use as paths for uploaded media files in Django.

Features

• Generate short (22 character), URL-safe base64-encoded UUIDs.
• Upload media files to short UUID filenames.

Installation

1. Checkout the latest django-uuid-upload-path release and copy or symlink the uuid_upload_path directory into your PYTHONPATH. If using pip, run pip install django-uuid-upload-path.

Generating short UUIDs

Generate a short, URL-safe UUID as follows:

::

from uuid_upload_path import uuid

uuid()  // -> "hCdLEjlQQJW25-sXB3T_Gw"

Generating upload paths

To upload media files to short UUID filenames, just set upload_to to uuid_upload_path.upload_to.

::

from uuid_upload_path import upload_to

class YourModel(models.Model):

    file = models.FileField(
        upload_to = upload_to,
    )

Why use UUIDs as upload paths?

Django tries to ensure that all your uploaded files are given unique names on the filesystem. It does this by checking if a file with the same name exists before saving a new one, and adding a suffix if the new file would otherwise conflict with the existing one.

If you're saving files to disk using the built-in django.core.files.storage.FileSystemStorage, this isn't much of a problem. However, if you're using a cloud file storage, such as storages.backends.s3boto.S3BotoStorage, this uniqueness check can have a noticeable effect on the performance of file uploads. Worse, the default configuration of S3BotoStorage is to overwrite existing files with the same name when uploading a new file!

By generating a unique filename for each uploaded file, django-uuid-upload-path removes the need for a costly uniqueness check, and avoids accidentally overwriting existing files on remote cloud storages.

Support and announcements

Downloads and bug tracking can be found at the main project website <http://github.com/etianen/django-uuid-upload-path>_.

More information

The django-uuid-upload-path project was developed by Dave Hall. You can get the code from the django-uuid-upload-path project site <http://github.com/etianen/django-uuid-upload-path>_.

Dave Hall is a web developer, based in Cambridge, UK. You can usually find him on the Internet in a number of different places:

• Website <http://www.etianen.com/>_
• Twitter <http://twitter.com/etianen>_
• Google Profile <http://www.google.com/profiles/david.etianen>_