flask-transfer 0.0.1

Validate and process file uploads in Flask easily

Validate, process and persist uploaded files through a single object instead of cramming all that stuff into your routes or writing your own pipeline for it.

Tired of this?

@app.route('/upload', methods=['GET', 'POST'])
def upload():
    form = UploadForm()

    if form.validate_on_submit():
        filehandle = form.uploaded.data
        allowed_exts = ('txt', 'md', 'rst')
        if not os.path.splitext(filehandle.filename)[1] in allowed_exts:
            raise UploadError('File type not allowed!')
        if filehandle.read() != b'hello world':
            raise UploadError('File contents not allowed!')
        # back to beginning
        filehandle.seek()
        username = g.current_user.name
        upload_path = current_app.config['UPLOAD_DIR']
        fullpath = os.path.join(upload_path, username, filehandle.filename)
        filehandle.save(fullpath)
        flash("Uploaded {}!".format(filehandle.filename))
        return redirect(url_for("upload"))
    else:
        return render_template('upload.html', form=form)

Heaven forbid if you need to other validation – will this file upload exceed the user’s allotment? – or processing – gotta make thumbnails, shove info into the database, etc. Of course, you’re a good programmer and broke all that logic into separate functions…right?

Wouldn’t it be nice to place all the validating, processing and saving logic in one object and just let that handle it for you?

Do this instead

from flask_transfer import Transfer, AllowedExts, UploadError

def _save_to_user_dir(filehandle):
    current_user = g.current_user
    upload_path = current_app.config['UPLOAD_DIR']
    fullpath = os.path.join(upload_path, current_user, filehandle.filename)
    filehandle.save(fullpath)


TextDocuments = AllowedExts('txt', 'md', 'rst')
TextTransfer = Transfer(validators=[TextDocuments], destination=_save_to_user_dir)

@TextTransfer.validator
def check_stream_contents(filehandle, metadata):
    if filehandle.read() != metadata['approved_contents']:
        raise UploadError('File contents not allowed')
    filehandle.seek()
    return True

@app.route('/upload', methods=['GET', 'POST'])
def upload():
    form = UploadForm()

    if form.validate_on_submit():
        filehandle = form.uploaded.data
        TextTransfer.save(filehandle, {})
        flash('Uploaded {}!'.format(filehandle.filename))
        return redirect(url_for('uploaded'))
    else:
        return render_template('upload.html', form=form)

Check out the quickstart for some more information, as well!

More Power

Flask-Transfer supplies hooks for validation, preprocessing and postprocessing via decorators. Need to create thumbnails of images? Just supply a resizer to the Transfer.preprocessor or Transfer.postprocessor hooks.

Validation beyond just checking file extensions is at your fingertips as well. Look at the current user’s disk usage and see if the upload would exceed the maximum. Just supply a callable to the Transfer.validator hook.

Maybe you’re running on Heroku and you can’t persist to the local filesystem. Create a callable or writable object that’ll pipe that data off to your S3 or Dropbox or the database (oh good god don’t do this) and use that as the destination. Flask-Transfer handles using callables, writables and string file paths all behind the scenes for you.

Todo

There’s still quite a bit to do. For example, better error handle. Perhaps a tighter integration with Flask, or running the opposite way and cleaving the already few dependencies on werkzeug to become framework independent.

Contributions

Given the infancy of this project, pull requests and issue are more than welcome. Just add yourself to the authors file, write some tests for the added or change functionality and submit it!