David Li
3 min readMar 8, 2024

Handling File Uploads with FastAPI, Django, and Flask: A Beginner’s Guide

Photo by Minh Pham on Unsplash

File uploads are a common requirement in web applications, allowing users to submit images, documents, and other files. As a software developer with years of experience, I’ve worked with various frameworks to implement file upload features. In this article, I’ll guide you through handling file uploads using three popular Python web frameworks: FastAPI, Django, and Flask. We’ll focus on the installation dependencies and ease of use to help junior developers get started.

FastAPI

FastAPI is a modern, fast web framework for building APIs with Python 3.6+ based on standard Python type hints. It’s known for its performance and ease of use.

Installation Dependencies

To start with FastAPI, you’ll need to install FastAPI and an ASGI server, such as uvicorn. You can install these using pip:

pip install fastapi uvicorn

File Upload Example

FastAPI simplifies file uploads using its File and UploadFile classes. Here's a basic example of a file upload endpoint:

from fastapi import FastAPI, File, UploadFile

app = FastAPI()

@app.post("/uploadfile/")
async def create_upload_file(file: UploadFile = File(...)):
return