Basic Pipeline for Python Rest API to handle images

Question

I'm trying to figure how to accept images via a rest api. If my api does something like this:

def post(self):
    sent_file = next(request.files.values())
    sent_file.seek(0)
    file_data = sent_file.stream.read()

    import boto
    from boto.s3.key import Key
    ....
    k = Key(bucket)
    k.set_contents_from_string(file_data)
    k.make_public()

and the request I send is:

rv = s.put('.../fileupload', files={'test.jpg': open('test.jpg', 'rb')})

this works but I know there is a cleaner solution. How do I send a file so that I can upload the file itself and not generate a string of the data and upload that? Also, is there an easy way to ensure the file is an image?

Answer 1

First of all I would recommend using postman to test RestFUL API's. You are getting a string because you are opening the file with put which forcibly produces a byte stream You can upload files using form-data with post. Unfortunately HTTP cannot type check file extension or file types. Better to check that at client or at server.