Get absolute image's path in DRF

Question

I'm recently approaching drf and I want to create a system that returns a user's information. Among the various fields, the user has an avatar which should return the URL of the photo where it is saved. The problem is that I get a relative path instead of an absolute path. Below I attach the code of my app.

models.py

def get_upload_path(instance, filename):
    return os.path.join('images' , 'avatar' , str(instance.pk),filename)
    
class CustomUser(AbstractUser):
    username = models.CharField(max_length=50, unique=True)
    email = models.EmailField(_('email address'), unique=True)
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    surname = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    avatar = models.ImageField(upload_to=get_upload_path, blank=True, null=True,)
    is_active = models.BooleanField(default=True)
    is_verified = models.BooleanField(default=False)
    date_joined = models.DateTimeField(_('date joined'), auto_now_add=True)
    last_login = models.DateTimeField(_('last login'), auto_now=True)

    USERNAME_FIELD = 'username'
    REQUIRED_FIELDS = ['email']  

    def __str__(self):
        return self.username

serializers.py

class CustomUserSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = CustomUser
        fields = ['id','username','email','name','surname','avatar',]
        

views.py

class CustomUserAPIView(APIView):

    def get(self,request):
        serializer = CustomUserSerializer(request.user)
        return Response(serializer.data)

what I get is this:

{
    "id": 1,
    "username": "admin",
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "name": "John",
    "surname": "Test",
    "avatar": "/media/images/avatar/1/photo.JPG"
}

but what I need to get is this

{
        "id": 1,
        "username": "admin",
        "email": "[email protected]",
        "name": "John",
        "surname": "Test",
        "avatar": "http://127.0.0.1:8000/media/images/avatar/1/photo.JPG"
}

how can I solve it? Thanks in advance for the reply

Answer 1

Use the url attribute available on FileFields (which ImageFields also are); you can get at it neatly with field.source.

class CustomUserSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    avatar = serializers.CharField(source="avatar.url")

    class Meta:
        model = CustomUser
        fields = [
            "id",
            "username",
            "email",
            "name",
            "surname",
            "avatar",
        ]

Answer 2

Set the UPLOADED_FILES_USE_URL setting ^[drf-doc] to True:

# settings.py

# …

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    'UPLOADED_FILES_USE_URL': True,
    # …
}