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:

• Site, an IProtocolFactory which glues a listening server port (IListeningPort) to the HTTPChannel implementation:

  from twisted.web.server import Site
  

• File, an IResource which glues the HTTP protocol implementation to the filesystem:

  from twisted.web.static import File
  

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

  from twisted.internet import reactor
  

• And the endpoints module, which gives us tools for, amongst other things, creating listening sockets:

  from twisted.internet import endpoints
  

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:

endpoint = endpoints.TCP4ServerEndpoint(reactor, 8080)
endpoint.listen(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, endpoints

resource = File('/tmp')
factory = Site(resource)
endpoint = endpoints.TCP4ServerEndpoint(reactor, 8080)
endpoint.listen(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 in the Twisted Core documentation for more information on using twistd.