Question

I need an interface to mongodb by which I can treat data in a collection like a standard python file-like object. These will be fairly small files (measured in kilobytes, at most) and in particular I need the ability to append to these so-called files. (So this question is not a dupe.)

I have read the GridFS documentation, and in particular it says I should not use it for small files. The only other implementations I’ve been able to find have all been PHP. I’m not really looking for help writing any specifics of the code, but implementing the entire file api seems a daunting task.

1. Are there any shortcuts or tools to make it easier to implement file-like objects in python 2?
2. Am I missing that someone has already done this?

(Why am I doing this? Because I received an eleventh-hour requirement that we deploy a pre-existing application that produces csv files on a multinode cloud environment that cannot transparently handle files.)

Answer 1

For question 1: check out the io module, and especially IOBase. It implements all of the file-likes in terms of a fairly sensible set of methods.