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