Is there a way to read the contents of a static data directory or interact with that data in any way from within the code of an application?
Edit: Please excuse me if it wasn't clear at first, I mean getting a list of the files in that directory, not reading the data in them.
No. Files marked as static in app.yaml are not available to your application; they're served from separate servers.
If you just need to list them, you could build a list as part of your deploy process. If you need to actually read them, you'll need to include a second copy in your application directory (although the "copy" can be just a symlink; appcfg.py will follow symlinks and upload them.)
You can just open them (only read only).
Related
I am relatively new to web development and very new to using Web2py. The application I am currently working on is intended to take in a CSV upload from a user, then generate a PDF file based on the contents of the CSV, then allow the user to download that PDF. As part of this process I need to generate and access several intermediate files that are specific to each individual user (these files would be images, other pdfs, and some text files). I don't need to store these files in a database since they can be deleted after the session ends, but I am not sure the best way or place to store these files and keep them separate based on each session. I thought that maybe the subfolders in the sessions folder would make sense, but I do not know how to dynamically get the path to the correct folder for the current session. Any suggestions pointing me in the right direction are appreciated!
I was having this error "TypeError: expected string or Unicode object, NoneType found" and I had to store just a link in the session to the uploaded document in the db or maybe the upload folder in your case. I would store it to upload to proceed normally, and then clear out the values and the file if not 'approved'?
If the information is not confidential in similar circumstances, I directly write the temporary files under /tmp.
I have to python files that create and read text from a .txt file, in order for them to work they need to know the info inside of the .txt file.
In heroku I have a scheduler that runs one file, then the other. The big problem is that the files are reset every time to their state from the original repo. How can I get around this?
Heroku does not offer a persistent file system. You will need to store them in another service (like S3), or depending on what the contents of your files are, redesign to write and read from a database instead.
I've a website running on Django, Heroku.
I need to add few static JavaScript files for a third-party plugin.
My newly added files are available at domain.com/static/filename.js.
I need them to be available at domain.com/filename.js.
How to make ONLY the newly added Javascript files available at domain.com/filename.js?
If the info is not sufficient please ask which code is needed in the comments.
My first choice in this situation would be to fix whatever is stopping you from putting it into /static/. I can't imagine any half-decent third-party plugin would demand that the files be in the root; there must be some way to configure it to work from a subdirectory. If there isn't, I'd fork the project and add the option, then try to get them to merge it back. I realise you've probably already explored this option, but can you give us some more details about the plugin you're trying to use, and the reason it needs to go into the root? This really would be the best solution.
If you really must have the file in the root, and want to keep it as part of your django project, I'd try symlinking the files into the public root. This would mean it would be available in both locations; I can't see why that would be a problem, but you do specify "ONLY" in the root and I'm sure you have your reasons; in that case, perhaps you could configure your web server to redirect from /static/filename.js to /filename.js?
Lastly, you technically could change the settings STATIC_URL and STATIC_ROOT to point at the root directory, but that sounds like a pretty terrible idea to me. If you've got this far and still need to do it, it would be far better to take the file out of your django project altogether and just manually place it in your web root.
If there are only a couple of these files, I guess you could do the following:
Create URLs for each of the files you want to serve
Hook those URLs up to a view that returns the file with the right content
refer to this snippet for an example view
First of all, I must say I have seen something similar to this in the web2py discussion group, but I couldn't understand it very well.
I've set up a database-driven website using web2py in which the entries are just HTML text. Most of them will contain img and/or video tags that point to relative URLs; these files are stored in folders with the address pattern static/content/article/<article-name> and the document's base href is set via the controller to make these links work. So, the images are stored and referenced directly, without all the upload/download machinery.
I'm testing it locally and using Rocket server because I'm not allowed to install Apache in this PC.
The problem:
Everything works fine, except, as it seems, when there are several "large" files being requested. By "large" I mean 4Mb files were enough, which isn't really a lot (and I think slightly smaller files would produce the same result). I'm pretty sure the links aren't broken since 1) by copying/pasting their URLs in the browser they show up normally, 2) the images/videos appear well/broken randomly when I refresh the page and 3) sometimes a video loads until a certain point and then stops, and the browser inspector shows a 'fail' signal. When I replaced these files with smaller ones (each with a dozen kb), all of them loaded. Another thing to consider is that sometimes it takes a really long time until the page finishes loading (from 2 seconds to several minutes).
The questions:
Is this the simplest/optimal way of getting the job done? I'm aware that web2py has some neat features like upload fields, but I don't know how I could make these files be effortlessly referenced in the document, considering there will be some special features in such pages involving the static files. So the solution I've come up with so far was to create a directory which name equals to the entry's and store the files there, as I said before. Is it an overkill considering what web2py has to offer?
If the answer to the first question is something like "yes", then (obvious question) what may be causing the problem and how do I fix it? Does it have something to do with the fact that web2py sends static files in chunks of 1Mb? Might it be the Rocket server? Or because I'm testing it locally?
Thanks in advance!
It's hard to give you an answer without knowing some details...
Where is hosted your Web2py application?
Do you use apache? nginx?
Did you deploy using a one step-deploy script? (http://web2py.googlecode.com/hg/scripts/setup-web2py-ubuntu.sh)
But in any case, you can (should) :
Configure Apache/Nginx to serve your static files directly (files in /YourApp/static/.). See "setup-web2py-" scripts in the "scripts" folder for more informations
Use scripts/zip_static_files.py to create gzipped versions of your static files. You can create a cron to run "python web2py.py -S myapp -R scripts/zip_static_files.py"
More details about efficiency in the book : http://web2py.com/books/default/chapter/29/13/deployment-recipes?search=static+files#Efficiency-and-scalability
My application has a xml based configuration. It has also a xsd file. Before my application starts, xmllint will check the configuration against the xsd file.
With the growth of my application, the configuration structure has changed a bit. Now I have to face this problem: When I provide a new version of my application to customer, I have to upgrade the existing configuration.
How to make this done easy and clever?
My idea is to build a configuration object using python, and then read configuration v1 from file and save it as v2. But if later the structure is changed again, I have to build another configuration object model.
For all configuration settings that remain the same between configurations, have your installation script copy those over from the old config file if it exists. For the rest, just have some defaults that the user can change if necessary, as usual for a config file. Unless I've misunderstood the question, it sounds like you're making a bigger deal out of this than it needs to be.
By the way, you'd really only need one "updater" script, because you could parametrize the XML tagging such that it go through your new config file/config layout file, and then just check the tags in the old file against that and copy the data from the ones that are present in the new file. I haven't worked with XSD files before, so I don't know the specifics of working with them, but I don't think it should be that difficult.