Serving static files

Directories can be added to be statically served by Glashammer. These directories are added during the application setup phase by using:

GlashammerApplication.add_shared(name, path)

Add a shared export for name that points to a given path and creates an url rule for shared/<name> that takes a filename parameter.

For example, to add the directory ‘/var/static’ to be served by Glashammer:

app.add_shared('files', '/var/static')

Glashammer will do two things:

1. Create an endpoint called shared/files (which is just ‘shared/’ + name) which is pointed to by a url /_shared/<filename> where the filename is the path to the requested file. 2. Create a WSGI middleware to serve these files.

The endpoint is particularly useful for reverse lookup of files, which could be done as:

url_for('shared/files', filename='css/main.css')

If you wanted a url for the file /var/static/css/main.css.

Real life deployment

In real life, it is fairly painful (and very slow) to serve static files like this, so in a deployment situation, it is best to keep these static directories added to Glashammer (for URL lookup) but additionally to alias the directories in the web server so that the requests never actually reach Glashammer.

See also

The gh-admin utility script offers the staticaliases function that can be run on an application to automatically create the rules you need for your web server configuration.

This is an example from an Apache2 configuration illustrating how to do this with mod_wsgi:

Alias /_shared/files /var/static
WSGIScriptAlias / /home/ali/my_glashammer_app.py

This will improve the performance significantly, while not forcing you to change anything between development and deployment.