Question

I am new at this and am planning to move my stuff from a paid web service to GAE (nothing dynamic just static pages). Believe me I have spent countless hours trying to make this work but am at an impasse whereby I achieve one result at the exclusion of another and visa versa.

I am sure it is a simple answer and that I am violating some basic principles. What I want is that the app engine page (mygaeid.appspot.com) delivers a static landing page such that other pages are available with the addition of a suffix e.g. mygaeid.appspot.com/oranges.html mygaeid.appspot.com/grapes.html etc.

I am unable to achieve this such that I either am able to get the other pages when I add the suffix e.g. mygaeid.appspot.com/apples.html; mygaeid.appspot.com/oranges.html but not the landing page OR with a slightly different yaml the landing page (mygaeid.appspot.com) works but there is no access to the other pages (mygaeid.appspot.com/oranges.html etc) that have a suffix.

The py file (abcdefg.py) is below and is common to the two different yamls that follow:

import os
from google.appengine.ext import webapp
from google.appengine.ext.webapp import util
from google.appengine.ext.webapp import template

class MainHandler(webapp.RequestHandler):
  def get (self, q):
    if q is None:
      q = 'htmdir/apples.html'

    path = os.path.join (os.path.dirname (__file__), q)
    self.response.headers ['Content-Type'] = 'text/html'
    self.response.out.write (template.render (path, {}))


def main ():
  application = webapp.WSGIApplication ([('/(.*html)?', MainHandler)], debug=True)
  util.run_wsgi_app (application)

if __name__ == '__main__':
  main ()

---

Using the following yaml the landing page (mygaeid.appspot.com) works perfectly (delivering the content of apples.html), but I cannot access the page if I add a suffix e.g. mygaeid.appspot.com/apples.html or mygaeid.appspot.com/static/htmdir/apples.html etc, as soon as I add the suffix it does not work. In the directory (htmdir) I have placed apples.html along with other html pages e.g. oranges.html etc and I cannot access any of them with this yaml.

application: mygaeid
version: 1
runtime: python
api_version: 1

handlers:
- url: /(.*\.(html))
  static_files: static/htmdir/\1
  upload: static/htmdir/(.*\.(html))

- url: /css
  static_dir: css

- url: /js
  static_dir: js

- url: /images
  static_dir: images

- url: .*
  script: abcdefg.py

If I modify the yaml as follows then the landing page (mygaeid.appspot.com) does not work but when I add the suffixes then it works perfectly e.g. mygaeid.appspot.com/apples.html; mygaeid.appspot.com/oranges.html etc deliver the appropriate pages:

- url: /(.*\.(html))
  static_files: htmdir/\1
  upload: htmdir/(.*\.(html))

Finally if I dispense with the directories altogether and using the same abcdefg.py (without the directory) the following very simple yaml actually delivers the results I want but is very unruly as all the files are stuffed in the root directory.

application: mygaeid
version: 1
runtime: python
api_version: 1

handlers:
- url: /(.*\.(png|js|css))
  static_files: \1
  upload: (.*\.(png|js|css))

- url: .*
  script: abcedfg.py

any help would be much appreciated on figuring this out.
thanks

---

thanks wooble and thanks dave I went back yet again and carefully read the logs Wooble’s solution works but I needed to put the htmdir (that contains the html) inside a directory called static. GAE is a great (and free) solution for static websites

your help and feedback is very much appreciated

SiteDirectory
-mygaeid
  -static
    -htmdir
  -js
  -css
  -images
 app.yaml
 index.yaml
(py file was removed)

Answer 1

If you declare files as static in app.yaml, they are not available to your application’s handlers.

However, if they’re really static, using the django template engine to “render” them is kind of silly; just add mappings in app.yaml to display the static files, including one to display apples.html for /:

application: mygaeid
version: 1
runtime: python
api_version: 1

handlers:
- url: /(.*\.html)
  static_files: static/htmdir/\1
  upload: static/htmdir/.*\.html

- url: /css
  static_dir: css

- url: /js
  static_dir: js

- url: /images
  static_dir: images

- url: /
  static_files: static/htmdir/apples.html
  upload: static/htmdir/apples\.html

(no python files needed)