flask.send_file¶

flask.send_file(filename_or_fp, mimetype=None, as_attachment=False, attachment_filename=None, add_etags=True, cache_timeout=None, conditional=False)[source]¶

Sends the contents of a file to the client. This will use the most efficient method available and configured. By default it will try to use the WSGI server’s file_wrapper support. Alternatively you can set the application’s use_x_sendfile attribute to True to directly emit an X-Sendfile header. This however requires support of the underlying webserver for X-Sendfile.

By default it will try to guess the mimetype for you, but you can also explicitly provide one. For extra security you probably want to send certain files as attachment (HTML for instance). The mimetype guessing requires a filename or an attachment_filename to be provided.

Please never pass filenames to this function from user sources; you should use send_from_directory() instead.

New in version 0.2.

New in version 0.5: The add_etags, cache_timeout and conditional parameters were added. The default behavior is now to attach etags.

Changed in version 0.7: mimetype guessing and etag support for file objects was deprecated because it was unreliable. Pass a filename if you are able to, otherwise attach an etag yourself. This functionality will be removed in Flask 1.0

Changed in version 0.9: cache_timeout pulls its default from application config, when None.

Parameters:

filename_or_fp – the filename of the file to send in latin-1. This is relative to the root_path if a relative path is specified. Alternatively a file object might be provided in which case X-Sendfile might not work and fall back to the traditional method. Make sure that the file pointer is positioned at the start of data to send before calling send_file(). mimetype – the mimetype of the file if provided, otherwise auto detection happens. as_attachment – set to True if you want to send this file with a Content-Disposition: attachment header. attachment_filename – the filename for the attachment if it differs from the file’s filename. add_etags – set to False to disable attaching of etags. conditional – set to True to enable conditional responses. cache_timeout – the timeout in seconds for the headers. When None (default), this value is set by get_send_file_max_age() of current_app.