Static files in a Bottle application cannot be found (404)

Question

I've reviewed all the questions here about this, reviewed the bottle tutorial, reviewed the bottle google group discussions, and AFAIK, I'm doing everything right. Somehow, though, I can't get my CSS file to load properly. I'm getting a 404 on the static file, that `http://localhost:8888/todo/static/style.css` is not found, which, according to the directory structure below, should not be the case. I'm using version 0.11 (unstable) of Bottle; is there anything I'm missing, or is this a bug in Bottle? My directory structure: ``` todo/ todo.py static/ style.css ``` My todo.py: ``` import sqlite3 from bottle import Bottle, route, run, debug, template, request, validate, static_file, error, SimpleTemplate # only needed when you run Bottle on mod_wsgi from bottle import default_app app = Bottle() default_app.push(app) appPath = '/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/todo/' @app.route('/todo') def todo_list(): conn = sqlite3.connect(appPath + 'todo.db') c = conn.cursor() c.execute("SELECT id, task FROM…

Accepted Answer

I don't quite understand your deployment. The `/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/` path, along with the lack of `app.run` in your code, suggest that you're running this under Apache. Is it a production deployment? For dev tasks you are supposed to use Bottle's built-in dev server, you know. Add a single `app.run()` towards the end of your `todo.py`, and you're done.

Now if you are using Apache, the most probably root cause is this line: `static_file(filename, root='./static')`. With mod_wsgi, you are not guaranteed that the working directory is equal to the directory where your `todo.py` is placed. In fact, it will almost never be.

You are using absolute paths for the database and the template, do so for the static files:

```
@route('/static/:filename#.*#', name='css')
def server_static(filename):
    return static_file(filename, root=os.path.join(appPath, 'static'))
```

Next, I don't understand where your app is mounted. The URL `http://localhost:8888/todo/static/style.css` suggests that the mount point is `/todo`, but the route for the `todo_list` handler is again `/todo`. Is the full path supposed to be `http://localhost/todo/todo`? Does your app have a `/` handler?

I'd also suggest to avoid hard-coding paths and concat'ing the path fragments together. This would be cleaner:

```
from os.path import join, dirname
...
appPath = dirname(__file__)

@app.route('/todo')
def todo_list():
    conn = sqlite3.connect(join(appPath, 'todo.db'))
    ...
```

Static files in a Bottle application cannot be found (404)

Solution

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