static-content.rst

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Serving Static Content From a Directory

The goal of this example is to show you how to serve static content from a filesystem. First, we need to import some objects:

• twisted.web.server.Site <Site>, an twisted.internet.interfaces.IProtocolFactory <IProtocolFactory> which glues a listening server port (twisted.internet.interfaces.IListeningPort <IListeningPort>) to the twisted.web.http.HTTPChannel <HTTPChannel> implementation:

  from twisted.web.server import Site

• twisted.web.static.File <File>, an twisted.web.resource.IResource <IResource> which glues the HTTP protocol implementation to the filesystem:

  from twisted.web.static import File

• The twisted.internet.reactor <reactor>, which drives the whole process, actually accepting TCP connections and moving bytes into and out of them:

  from twisted.internet import reactor

Next, we create an instance of the File resource pointed at the directory to serve:

resource = File("/tmp")

Then we create an instance of the Site factory with that resource:

factory = Site(resource)

Now we glue that factory to a TCP port:

reactor.listenTCP(8888, factory)

Finally, we start the reactor so it can make the program work:

reactor.run()

And that's it. Here's the complete program:

from twisted.web.server import Site
from twisted.web.static import File
from twisted.internet import reactor

resource = File('/tmp')
factory = Site(resource)
reactor.listenTCP(8888, factory)
reactor.run()

Bonus example! For those times when you don't actually want to write a new program, the above implemented functionality is one of the things the command line twistd tool can do. In this case, the command

twistd -n web --path /tmp

will accomplish the same thing as the above server. See helper programs <../../../core/howto/basics> in the Twisted Core documentation for more information on using twistd.