django-uuid-upload-path 1.0.0

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.

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.

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

• Twitter

• Google Profile