Django – how to create a file and save it to a model’s FileField?

Here’s my model. What I want to do is generate a new file and overwrite the existing one whenever a model instance is saved:

class Kitten(models.Model):
    claw_size = ...
    license_file = models.FileField(blank=True, upload_to='license')

    def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
        #Generate a new license file overwriting any previous version
        #and update file path
        self.license_file = ???
        super(Request,self).save(*args, **kwargs)

I see lots of documentation about how to upload a file. But how do I generate a file, assign it to a model field and have Django store it in the right place?

Answer

You want to have a look at FileField and FieldFile in the Django docs, and especially FieldFile.save().

Basically, a field declared as a FileField, when accessed, gives you an instance of class FieldFile, which gives you several methods to interact with the underlying file. So, what you need to do is:

self.license_file.save(new_name, new_contents)

where new_name is the filename you wish assigned and new_contents is the content of the file. Note that new_contents must be an instance of either django.core.files.File or django.core.files.base.ContentFile (see given links to manual for the details).

The two choices boil down to:

from django.core.files.base import ContentFile, File

# Using File
with open('/path/to/file') as f:
    self.license_file.save(new_name, File(f))

# Using ContentFile
self.license_file.save(new_name, ContentFile('A string with the file content'))