How do I serve static files from a different URL with Dart?

Question

With Dart, I've got awesome.html, but I'd like it to be /awesome. Is this purely an .htaccess (I'm using Apache) thing, or is there a way to go about this the Dart or "modern web development" way?

This .htaccess bit directs /awesome to /awesome.html:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule .*[^/]$ %{REQUEST_URI}/ [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ $1.html [L]

But then all my relative URL references (to css/js/images) break, and if I rewrite them from "assets/whatever" to "/assets/whatever" it'll break when working in the Dart Editor since it uses URLs like:

http://127.0.0.1:3030/Users/dave/Sites/my-dart-app/web/awesome.html

Ideas? Best practices? Thank you!

Answer 1

thanks for the question!

The answer depends on if you have a proxy or web server in front of your Dart server VM. If you have a proxy in front, then the proxy can do the URL rewriting before the request hits your Dart VM. This is a nice scenario anyway, because a proxy can do caching, SSL, load balancing, and more. The Dart VM is then just an "app server" in this scenario. I would recommend placing an industrial strength web server or proxy in front just as a best practice.

However, if you want to do URL masking and rewriting purely in Dart, here is some code. As Kai says in the comments above, this is generally a framework's job. But I'll include some code here anyway for fun. :)

import 'dart:io';
import 'dart:json';

class StaticFileHandler {
  final String basePath;

  StaticFileHandler(this.basePath);

  _send404(HttpResponse response) {
    response.statusCode = HttpStatus.NOT_FOUND;
    response.outputStream.close();
  }

  String rewritePath(String path) {
    String newPath = path;

    if (path == '/' || path.endsWith('/')) {
      newPath = '${path}index.html'; 
    } else if (!path.endsWith('.html')) {
      newPath = "${path}.html";
    }

    return newPath;
  }

  // TODO: etags, last-modified-since support
  onRequest(HttpRequest request, HttpResponse response) {
    String path = rewritePath(request.path);

    final File file = new File('${basePath}${path}');
    file.exists().then((found) {
      if (found) {
        file.fullPath().then((String fullPath) {
          if (!fullPath.startsWith(basePath)) {
            _send404(response);
          } else {
            file.openInputStream().pipe(response.outputStream);
          }
        });
      } else {
        _send404(response);
      }
    });
  }

}

runServer(String basePath, int port) {
  HttpServer server = new HttpServer();

  server.defaultRequestHandler = new StaticFileHandler(basePath).onRequest;
  server.onError = (error) => print(error);
  server.listen('127.0.0.1', 1337);
  print('listening for connections on $port');
}

main() {
  var script = new File(new Options().script);
  var directory = script.directorySync();
  runServer("${directory.path}", 1337);
}

Answer 2

By the way, I've updated the rewritePath() function in Seth's code some so that it doesn't rewrite assets like .dart and .css files to .html, and so that it works w/ my client-side stuff living in /web.

  String rewritePath(String path) {
    String newPath = path;

    if (path == '/' || path.endsWith('/')) {
      newPath = '/web${path}index.html';
    } else if (!path.endsWith('.html')) {
      if (path.contains('.')) {
        newPath = '/web${path}';
      } else {
        newPath = '/web${path}.html';
      }
    } else {
      newPath = '/web${path}.html';
    }

    //peek into how it's rewriting the paths
    print('$path -> $newPath');

    return newPath;
  }

It's of course super basic, and a framework that handles routing would certainly come in handy (would love to see what you're building @Kai).