Question

As in question, i have form with

file = forms.FileFIeld(widget = forms.FIleInput())

but this allows me to browse files on clients computer. I would like to show me my own server-side files. I am fully aware of security risks. This is my personal project and won’t be used by anyone else (just in case anyone would shout at me). It doesn’t have to be just the same mechanism. I only want to obtain this name from form. Nothing shall be uploaded or downloaded.

This will work as file selecting for another server app.

If it isn’t possible to browse whole computer, how can I specify directories where I can store files for further browsing?

Answer 1

If you want to build a system to access files on your computer remotely, you can do it using ftp or ssh.

If you need to access files in a particular directory you can put them in the static part of django and have django serve you static content. This is however not the intended design for django and you might as well serve files of a http server with Apache.

If you are looking to build a google docs/dropbox kind of web service, then django can help you as a web framework. However you would need to run some kind of local indexing and add all file metadata indexes to your database using something like PyLucene and then upload the same files to a downloadable path online or on your static serve folder. This is not a Django problem per se.