I'm fairly new to web development and I can't really find the best way to handle serving files with Django.
My situation is:
I have users from different departments that can upload, edit and download files. Users should have access to files from other users of the same department, but not of the others.
The way it works until now is: each file path is written in a database, with a reference to which department it belongs. If requesting a file Django checks if the department of the user is the same as the file, and denies access if that is not the case. So it's implemented using a normal view that returns a StreamingHttpResponse.
After researching a bit it seemed that serving files that way isn't the standard way, and I should serve them as static files (from the web server, not directly by Django). My question is: can I still restrict the access of static files, or can anyone read them?
Related
I'm wondering how to deal with importing files, when I work with a frontend hosted on OVH, and a backend hosted on Heroku.
So, here is my logic, I would like to know if it makes sense to you :
I create a route in my API that will store the file in my backend server
I update the user profile with a string that correspond to the path of the file
From the front, I ask a route that will ask the file to the backend with the path stored in mongoDB
Does that make sense ?
I think what you described makes a lot of sense. However I suggest a minor change, Instead of saving file path in user profile, save the complete hosted URL of the file. This will come in handy if you choose to change your image hosting solution later on and also reduces the dependency between your client and backend.
To render on threejs, we need some images(jpg/png) and , jsons(uv data). All these files are stored in respective folders and the files visible for clients to look at.
I use django/python to start a local server, python code is compiled to .pyc & js code is obfuscated. But the folder structure is accessible for Casual Users. In threejs, we use tex_loader and json_loader functions to which the file paths are given as inputs. Was looking at ways of securing the behind the scenes work.
Happened to read about custom binary formats, but that felt like a lot of work.
or giving access to files only for certain process starting through django/web browser?
Are there any available easy to deploy solutions to protect our IP ?
An option would be to only serve the files to authenticated users. This could be achieved by having an endpoint on your backend like:
api/assets/data.json
and the controller in the backend would receive the file name(data.json), the code could check if the user requesting the endpoint is authenticated and if so read the file from the file system(my-private-folder/assets/data.json) and return it as file with correct mime-type to the browser.
I want to export a table to an Excel file. I need to export a report.
ORA_EXCEL.new_document;
ORA_EXCEL.add_sheet('Sheet name');
ORA_EXCEL.query_to_sheet('select * from mytable');
ORA_EXCEL.save_to_blob(myblob);
I saved my table to blob.
How do I export/respond to the user (client)?
I need something that is simple to allow a user to be able to download an Excel file to their own computer. I tried doing this procedure in an Oracle workflow:
ORA_EXCEL.save_to_file('EXPORT_DIR', 'example.xlsx');
But this did not help, because it is saves the file to a directory on the server and I need it in the real server.
The way I have handled similar issues in the past was to work with the systems people to mount a directory from either a web server or file server on the Database server.
Then create a directory object so that the procedure can save to a location that is accessible to the user.
If the files are not sensitive and there are a limited number of users then a file server makes sense as it is then just a matter of giving the user access to the file share.
If files are sensitive or this is a large number or unknown users we then used the Web server and sent a email with a link to the user enabling them to download their file. Naturally there needs to be security built into this to stop people being able to download other users files.
We didn't just email the files as an attachment because...
1) Emails with attachments tend to get blocked
2) We always advise not to open attachments on emails. (Yes I know we advise not to click on links as well but nothing is perfect)
Who or what is invoking the production of the document?
If it´s done by an application, which the user is working on, this application can fetch the BLOB, stores it at f.e. TEMP-Directory and calls
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("..."); to open it with the associated application. (see Open file with associated application)
If it´s a website, this one could stream the blob back as Excel-Mimetype (see Setting mime type for excel document)
Also you could store in an Oracle-DIRECTORY, but this one has to be on the server and should be a netword-share to be accessible for clients (which is rarely accepted in a productive environment!)
If MAIL isn´t the solution, then maybe FTP can be a way to store files in a common share. See UTL_TCP - Package, with this a FTP-transfer can be achieved (a bit hard to code, but there are solutions to find in the web) and I guess, professional tools that generate Office-documents out of Oracle-DB and distribute them do it like this.
Currently I'm working on a web project (Classic Asp) and I'm going to make an upload form.
Folklore says:
"Don't use the real name to save the uploaded files"
.
What are the problems, dangers, from the security point of view ?
Proper directory permissions should stop most of this stuff but I suppose for file names a potential danger is that they could name it something like "../Default.asp" or "../Malware.asp" or some other malicious path attempting to overwrite files and/or have an executable script on your server.
If I'm using a single upload folder, I always save my users uploads with a GUID file name just because users aren't very original and you get name conflicts very often otherwise.
I need to develop a site on Drupal 7. I have some content types with File fields in CCK. And access to nodes of these types should be granted only to specific Drupal user role. And at any moment site administrator should be able to make these Nodes 'public' or 'private'.
I can make nodes visible only to specific user roles, but this is not secure enough. If anonymous user knows the path to file ( www.mysite.org/hidden_files/file1 ), he can download it.
What is the most elegant way to solve this problem?
Thanks in advance.
Check out this documentation here: http://drupal.org/documentation/modules/file
Specifically, the section titled "Managing file locations and access" which talks about setting up a private data store (all supported by Drupal 7, it just needs to be configured).
To paraphrase, create a folder such as:
sites/default/files/private
Put a .htaccess file in that folder with the following to prevent direct access to the files via the web:
Deny from all
(the documentation claims that the following step does the above steps automatically, I haven't tested that unfortunately but you may be able to save some time if you skip the above two steps)
Log into Drupal's admin interface, go to /admin/config/media/file-system, configure the private URL and select Private Files Served by Drupal as the default download method.
In order to define the fine-grained access to nodes and fields, you can use Content Access: http://drupal.org/project/content_access
You will also need to edit your content types and set the file / image upload fields to save the uploaded files into Private Files instead of Public Files.
At this point, the node and field level permissions will determine whether or not users are allowed to access the files which will be served through menu hooks that verify credentials before serving the file.
Hope this helps.