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I am trying to set up a website with many static html files. Currently I am serving the html files as static files with an app.yaml handler of
- url: /(.*)
static_files: www/\1
upload: www/(.*)
secure: always
What I need to do now is the ability to run some python code whenever someone is redirected to one of these html files.
Is there some way to both serve html files as static files, and run a python script when it is called? Besides javascript, of course.
My initial thought was to have a handler for html files that would run a script, and then that script would do the backend task it needs to do and then serve the html file as a template using webapp2 or jinja. My html files are stored a few directories down from my python file, in several sub-directories:
-app.yaml
-main.py
-www
-version1
--sub directories stored here
Currently my test handler to try and get this to work looks like this:
class testHandler(BaseHandler):
def get(self, url):
tplPath = self.request.url
parseURL = urlparse(tplPath)
path = "www" + dirname(parseURL.path)
filename = basename(parseURL.path)
return jinja2.Environment(
loader=jinja2.FileSystemLoader(path)
).get_template(filename).render()
This gets url or the html file that the requested, adds the www part of the path (side-note, I removed the www part from the served url to keep it consistent with an old website layout), and then tries to render the html file located in the path folder.
When I try to run this, say by accessing https:// AppID.appspot.com/version1/product1/index.html, I get the error
TemplateNotFound: index.html
I checked the path that is being sent to the loader, and it is the correct path to the directory that contains the index.html file.
Is there something obvious i'm missing here? Keep in mind my experience using jinja2 is very limited. Alternatively, is there any other way I could run a python script and still serve the html files? Any help is appreciated.

You are using a relative path to the templates, and Jinja2 needs an absolute path according to this post. So instead of path = "www" + dirname(parseURL.path), do this:
# assuming that dirname is os.path.dirname:
path = os.path.join(dirname(__file__),"www" + dirname(parseURL.path))
What this line does is it gets the directory name of __file__, and __file__ is the full, absolute path of the current *.py file that you are running. So, dirname(__file__) is your working directory. After replacing that one line, the rest of your code should work.