Google App Engine - default MIME type

Question

Long story short:

I'm building a static web application which seems to work fine locally when served with the Node http-server, but when deployed to Google App Engine, has issues. I've traced the problem to the content-type header: when serving locally, some of my files (from an Emscripten library) are served with application/octet-stream; charset=utf-8 which works. When served from App Engine, they're served with simply application/octet-stream, which does not work. I've been able to verify this by adding a mime_type: application/octet-stream; charset=utf-8 line to one of my app.yaml handlers, but there are dozens or hundreds of files intermingled with different MIME types. I don't want to mark them all as octet-stream if I don't have to.

So is there a way in app.yaml to simply specify a default mimetype besides application/octet-stream? If not, I'll have to get much more creative with my handler matchers.

Answer 1

You can't set a default global mime type, but you can (as you mention) get creative. This is a good example of an app.yaml file for a static website, it's not unusual to define cases for each different file type, in order to have fine control over placement/mime.

In your case, you might wish to extend on the following idea:

- url: /(.*\.(svg|svgz))
  mime_type: images/svg+xml
  static_files: static/\1
  upload: static/(.*\.(svg|svgz))

Using this pattern you can match multiple file types with the same mime type. Might be the quickest (& dirtiest?) path to solve your problem.

Here's another app.yaml example for further reference.