django-availfiles

A minimal, frontend-agnostic file library for Django. AvailFile is a flat model — upload a file, get a URL back — deliberately not related to any other model via a foreign key. The point is a place to put a file once and link to it from anywhere (a blog post body, a product description, an email), not a structured per-model attachment relation.

What this package does, and doesn't, do

• AvailFile: file, original_filename (captured automatically on save), an optional label, uploaded_by, uploaded_at.
• Registers with Django admin.
• It does not ship any views, URLs, upload endpoint, or picker UI — that's genuinely framework/host-specific (a dashboard page, a rich-text editor's file-picker, a plain form), and belongs in an integration layer. For an Oscar dashboard + TinyMCE integration, see django-oscar-availfiles.
• No opinion on which file types are allowed. A deployment might restrict this library to non-image files (if images already have their own upload flow elsewhere) — that's a policy decision for whichever upload view is actually used, not something this model enforces.

Installation

uv add django-availfiles

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...,
    "availfiles",
]

Run manage.py migrate.

Translations

The package ships a Spanish translation (src/availfiles/locale/es/). Both the .po source and the compiled .mo are committed, so the wheel includes the .mo and nothing needs compiling on install. After editing a .po, recompile before releasing:

msgfmt -o src/availfiles/locale/es/LC_MESSAGES/django.mo \
    src/availfiles/locale/es/LC_MESSAGES/django.po

New strings are extracted with django-admin makemessages -l es run from src/availfiles/. A project can override any single string in its own LOCALE_PATHS without copying the whole catalogue.

Development

uv sync
uv run pytest