Serve static file using App Engine

Question

I created an App Engine application. Till now, I only have a few HTML files to serve. What can I do to make App Engine serve the index.html file whenever someone visits http

Answer 1

This should do what you need:

https://gist.github.com/873098

Explanation: In App Engine Python it's possible to use regular expressions as URL handlers in app.yaml and redirect all URLs to a hierarchy of static files.

Example app.yaml:

application: your-app-name-here
version: 1
runtime: python
api_version: 1

handlers:
- url: /(.*\.css)
  mime_type: text/css
  static_files: static/\1
  upload: static/(.*\.css)

- url: /(.*\.html)
  mime_type: text/html
  static_files: static/\1
  upload: static/(.*\.html)

- url: /(.*\.js)
  mime_type: text/javascript
  static_files: static/\1
  upload: static/(.*\.js)

- url: /(.*\.txt)
  mime_type: text/plain
  static_files: static/\1
  upload: static/(.*\.txt)

- url: /(.*\.xml)
  mime_type: application/xml
  static_files: static/\1
  upload: static/(.*\.xml)

# image files
- url: /(.*\.(bmp|gif|ico|jpeg|jpg|png))
  static_files: static/\1
  upload: static/(.*\.(bmp|gif|ico|jpeg|jpg|png))

# index files
- url: /(.+)/
  static_files: static/\1/index.html
  upload: static/(.+)/index.html

# redirect to 'url + /index.html' url.
- url: /(.+)
  static_files: static/redirector.html
  upload: static/redirector.html

# site root
- url: /
  static_files: static/index.html
  upload: static/index.html

In order to handle requests to URLs that don't end with a recognized type (.html, .png, etc.) or / you need to redirect those requests to URL + / so the index.html for that directory is served. I don't know of a way to do this inside the app.yaml, so I added a javascript redirector. This could also be done with a tiny python handler.

redirector.html: