# Django Media Files

In Django, media files can be defined as those files which are uploaded by the users. For examples:
1. Profile Picture uploads
2. File Uploads and many more ...

#### Configurations
On our Django settings `settings.py` we add `MEDIA_URL` and `MEDIA_ROOT` settings
```
MEDIA_URL='/media/'
MEDIA_ROOT = BASE_DIR /'media' 
```
or 
```
MEDIA_ROOT = '/var/www/media/' 
```
> Note: `MEDIA_ROOT` is the folder where your file gets saved.

#### Creating a URL configurations so serve uploaded files
In static files serving, Django would provide us with a way to serve static files automatically, But to serve the media files we will need to create a URL configurations to serve all media files from `MEDIA_ROOT`
```py
from django.conf import settings
from django.conf.urls.static import static

urlpatterns = [
     # rest of project url patterns
]
if settings.DEBUG: 
    urlpatterns += static(settings.MEDIA_URL,
                          document_root=settings.MEDIA_ROOT)

``` 
> Note: we serve media files like this on local development environment only, on production servers we use a different approach. We serve these assets directly through the webserver.

> Just to try if everything is working, you can create a sample file(`image.jpg`) inside the `MEDIA_ROOT` directory, and check if Django is serving it at `/media/image.jpg`

#### Simple File Upload in Django

- When files are submitted from HTML form to server, the file data can be accessed from `request.FILES` on Django views. `request.FILES` is a dict like object
- Each key in `request.FILES` is the name from `<input type="file" name="">`
- It's mandatory for the HTML forms to have the attribute `enctype="multipart/form-data"`
- Form must be submitted using `POST` method
- Django has proper model fields `ImageField` and  `FileField` for handling file uploads
- These uploaded files are stored on filesystem `(MEDIA_ROOT)` and only the reference of file is stored in `ImageField` or  `FileField` in Database. So basically these fields are abstraction created by Django to help us deal with file uploads but deep down they are just the `CharField` on database side

Example: A basic file uploads, and handling the file uploads manually on the Django side

on HTML side,
```
<!-- image-uploads.html -->
<form method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
    {% csrf_token %}
    <input type="file" name="image">
    <input type="submit" value="submit">
</form>
```
on Django view side,

```py
from django.core.files.storage import FileSystemStorage
from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.shortcuts import render

def image_upload(request):
    if request.method == 'POST' and request.FILES['image']:
        image = request.FILES['image']
        fs = FileSystemStorage()

        # save the image on MEDIA_ROOT folder
        file_name = fs.save(image.name, image)

        # get file url with respect to `MEDIA_URL`
        file_url = fs.url(file_name)
        return HttpResponse(file_url)
    else:
        # render the form
        return render(request, "image-uploads.html")
```

That't it, now we can process file uploads in Django, save it to the `MEDIA_ROOT` location automatically using `FileSystemStorage()` 

> When using Django model and fields with `ImageFiled` or `FileField` we don't need to perform the file processing/saving manually like we did just now. Simply we would assign the file to the field, and call the model.save() method like we generally do. I will talk about it in detail in some other tutorial.