Split off file-serving capability

[Bastian Kleineidam <calvin@…>]

Split the file-serving capability of the Django static view into a
separate function, and add the ability to set the mimetype manually.

Note: I use the split off serve_file() to check certain (user) permissions prior to serving static content.

[Thomas Güttler]

Splitting the file serving method to a separate method should include the change, that you
can use the underlaying sendfile (linux) or similar of the operating system.

Related: ticket #7894 and ticket #2131.

[(none)]

Milestone post-1.0 deleted

[Carl Meyer]

The recommended way to do permission-protected static files is by sending an X-SendFile header to the front-end webserver, and there are good third-party tools available for doing that with Django. Django's file-serving code is not intended for production use.

[Benoît Bryon]

For the record, ​http://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-downloadview is a third-party tool designed for the use case explained in this ticket: register some "download view", decorate it (i.e. perform some actions with Django), then use X-SendFile headers to let the webserver deal with the serving.

As of 2012-12-04, only Nginx's X-Accel-Redirect is supported, but other servers could easily be added.