FileResponse

Since Django 1.7

New In Django 1.7

FileResponse is a subclass of StreamingHttpResponse optimized for binary files. It uses wsgi.file_wrapper if provided by the wsgi server, otherwise it streams the file out in small chunks.

Source code

class FileResponse(StreamingHttpResponse):
    """
    A streaming HTTP response class optimized for files.
    """
    block_size = 4096

    def _set_streaming_content(self, value):
        if hasattr(value, 'read'):
            self.file_to_stream = value
            filelike = value
            if hasattr(filelike, 'close'):
                self._closable_objects.append(filelike)
            value = iter(lambda: filelike.read(self.block_size), b'')
        else:
            self.file_to_stream = None
        super(FileResponse, self)._set_streaming_content(value)

file_to_stream

It uses wsgi.file_wrapper if provided by the wsgi server, otherwise it streams the file out in small chunks.

See django/core/handlers/wsgi.py

if getattr(response, 'file_to_stream', None) is not None and environ.get('wsgi.file_wrapper'):
    response = environ['wsgi.file_wrapper'](response.file_to_stream)
return response

Before Django 1.7

References

[1] Docs@DjangoProject, FileResponse objects