How To Download Streaming Responses as a File in Python
Most of the time, a streaming response is the preferred choice when returning audio or video files from a server. This is mainly because streaming responses work really well for large files — especially those that exceed 1GB in file size.
In this tutorial, you will learn to:
- Create a simple FastAPI server that returns an audio file via StreamingResponse .
- Create a simple Python script to call the FastAPI server and save the response as a file directly to disk.
Let’s proceed to the next section and start installing the necessary modules.
Setup
It is highly recommended to create a virtual environment before you continue with the setup.
FastAPI
Activate the virtual environment and run the following command to install FastAPI:
Uvicorn
You will need an ASGI server in order to serve FastAPI. The recommended choice is Uvicorn. You can choose to install the standard version via:
pip install uvicorn[standard] Or the minimal version as follows:
Requests
To keep it simple and short, the requests package will be used to call the FastAPI server. Please note that requests is based on blocking I/O. Hence, it will block the content property until the entire response has been downloaded. If you are looking for non-blocking-I/O packages, consider using asyncio instead. Run the following command to install it:
Implementation
In this section, you will implement:
FastAPI server
Create a new Python file called server.py and append the following code inside it: