GAE: How to upload files to be accessed by the application?

Update: I found the problem. My static rule for HTML files still matched the templates even though they were in a subdirectory. After changing the rule to not match them anymore, the files could be accessed by the application.

I'm creating a Google AppEngine application. I'm using the Go language but I'm not sure that's relevant. I want to use a template with a separate template file. So the application must read the template file. Locally this works but after uploading the app to GAE, I get "no such file or directory" when calling template.ParseFiles().

So I'm thinking that somehow I must indicate that the template files are application files so that they get uploaded in the right way. I thought maybe my template files were uploaded as static files because of this in my app.yaml

- url: /(.*\.html)
  static_files: 
  upload: .*\.html

So I moved them to their own directory. But that didn't make a difference. I tried adding an upload directive for my script rule in app.yaml like this:

- url: /.*
  script: _go_app
  upload: templates/.*

But that didn't seem to be allowed. So can anyone tell me how do I access the template files (or any data files) from my GAE application?

Thanks!

All files in your project directory are automatically uploaded.

If your app needs to access them (this is your case as you are working with templates) you can't mark them as static. This is why the first solution fails.

The second attempt, does not work either as upload is not a member of an url description.

In your case, just deploy your app and the files will be automatically uploaded and available to your app (you may need to get the basepath of your project to construct the full path to the template).

The files are automatically uploaded, assuming they're not in a static_dir or static_files directory. See the Skipping Files section in the App Engine documentation. App Engine treats such directories and files as static resources, and static resources are served separately from the application.

Static resources are not normally accessible from application code. If you must put your templates in the same directory as your other static resources, you can use the application_readable setting to make such resources accessible to your app as well.

But as you note, you can put your templates in a place within your app that isn't mapped to a static resource path; that's probably the right thing to do.

Check the different options for the app.yaml at 1. You can check the static_dir and static_files options. I’m sharing a sample that is able to download static files. These files are in the static folder adn test folder. I share my app.yaml:

runtime: python27
api_version: 1
threadsafe: yes

handlers:
- url: .*
  script: main.app

- url: /test
  static_dir: test  
  application_readable: true

- url: /(.*\.(gif|png|jpg))$
  static_files: static/
  upload: static/.*\.(gif|png|jpg)$
  application_readable: true

And the main.py:

…
import webapp2
...
class Download(webapp2.RequestHandler):
    def get(self):
  
      imageName = self.request.get('img-name')
      self.response.headers['Content-Disposition'] = str('attachment; filename=' + imageName)
      f = None
      try:
          f = open('static/' + imageName, 'r')
          self.response.out.write(f.read())
      except:
          self.response.out.write('Jon Wayne')

class Test(webapp2.RequestHandler):
    def get(self):
  
      imageName = self.request.get('tst-name')
      self.response.headers['Content-Disposition'] = str('attachment; filename=' + imageName)
      f = None
      try:
          f = open('test/' + imageName, 'r')
          self.response.out.write(f.read())
      except:
          self.response.out.write('Jon Test')

app = webapp2.WSGIApplication([
    ('/download', Download),
    ('/tst', Test)
], debug=True)

I have two images: fib2.png and fib1.jpeg
Then in the Test folder I have two files fib2.tst and fib1.tst.

Web is the domain name.

https://web.com/download?img-name=fib2.png

https://web.com/download?img-name=fib1.jpeg

https://web.com/tst?tst-name=fib2.tst

https://web.com/tst?tst-name=fib1.tst

Hope this helps!

1 https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/go/config/appref#handlers_element