Only accept a certain file type in FileField, server-side

Question

How can I restrict FileField to only accept a certain type of file (video, audio, pdf, etc.) in an elegant way, server-side?

Answer 1

There's a Django snippet that does this:

import os

from django import forms

class ExtFileField(forms.FileField):
    """
    Same as forms.FileField, but you can specify a file extension whitelist.

    >>> from django.core.files.uploadedfile import SimpleUploadedFile
    >>>
    >>> t = ExtFileField(ext_whitelist=(".pdf", ".txt"))
    >>>
    >>> t.clean(SimpleUploadedFile('filename.pdf', 'Some File Content'))
    >>> t.clean(SimpleUploadedFile('filename.txt', 'Some File Content'))
    >>>
    >>> t.clean(SimpleUploadedFile('filename.exe', 'Some File Content'))
    Traceback (most recent call last):
    ...
    ValidationError: [u'Not allowed filetype!']
    """
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        ext_whitelist = kwargs.pop("ext_whitelist")
        self.ext_whitelist = [i.lower() for i in ext_whitelist]

        super(ExtFileField, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)

    def clean(self, *args, **kwargs):
        data = super(ExtFileField, self).clean(*args, **kwargs)
        filename = data.name
        ext = os.path.splitext(filename)[1]
        ext = ext.lower()
        if ext not in self.ext_whitelist:
            raise forms.ValidationError("Not allowed filetype!")

#-------------------------------------------------------------------------

if __name__ == "__main__":
    import doctest, datetime
    doctest.testmod()