Working with file uploads and downloads

Handling files is a common requirement in web applications, whether it’s uploading user avatars, downloading reports, or processing data files. FastAPI provides efficient and easy-to-implement methods for both uploading and downloading files. This recipe will guide you through how to set up and implement file handling in FastAPI.

Getting ready

Let’s create a new project directory called uploads_and_downloads that contains a main.py module with a folder called uploads. This will contain the files from the application side. The directory structure will look like this:

uploads_and_downloads/
|─ uploads/
|─ main.py

We can now proceed to create the appropriate endpoints.

How to do it…

To handle file uploads in FastAPI, you must use the File and UploadFile classes from FastAPI. The UploadFile class is particularly useful as it provides an asynchronous interface and spools large files to disk to avoid...