pants.web.fileserver

pants.web.fileserver implements a basic static file server for use with a HTTPServer or Application. It makes use of the appropriate HTTP headers and the sendfile system call, as well as the X-Sendfile header to improve transfer performance.

Serving Static Files

The pants.web.fileserver module can be invoked directly using the -m switch of the interpreter to serve files in a similar way to the standard library’s SimpleHTTPServer. However, it performs much more efficiently than SimpleHTTPServer for this task.

$ python -m pants.web.fileserver

When doing this, you may use additional arguments to specify which address the server should bind to, as well as which filenames should serve as directory indices. By default, only index.html and index.htm are served as indices.

FileServer

class pants.web.fileserver.FileServer(path, blacklist=(<_sre.SRE_Pattern object>, ), defaults=('index.html', 'index.htm'))

The FileServer is a request handling class that, as it sounds, serves files to the client using pants.http.server.HTTPRequest.send_file(). As such, it supports caching headers, as well as X-Sendfile if the HTTPServer instance is configured to use the Sendfile header. FileServer is also able to take advantage of the sendfile system call to improve performance when X-Sendfile is not in use.

Argument	Default	Description
path		The path to serve.
blacklist	.py and .pyc files	Optional. A list of regular expressions to test filenames against. If a given file matches any of the provided patterns, it will not be downloadable and instead return a 403 Unauthorized error.
default	index.html, index.htm	Optional. A list of default files to be displayed rather than a directory listing if they exist.

Using it is simple. It only requires a single argument: the path to serve files from. You can also supply a list of default files to check to serve rather than a file listing.

When used with an Application, the FileServer is not created in the usual way with the route decorator, but rather with a method of the FileServer itself. Example:

FileServer("/tmp/path").attach(app)

If you wish to listen on a path other than /static/, you can also use that when attaching:

FileServer("/tmp/path").attach(app, "/files/")

attach(app, path='/static/')

Attach this FileServer to an Application, bypassing the usual route decorator to ensure the rule is configured as FileServer expects.

Argument	Default	Description
app		The Application instance to attach to.
rule	'/static/'	Optional. The path to serve requests from.