On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 10:59:26PM +0100, Thomas Weholt wrote:
I need to serve a binary file from disk, not available in the normal folder for static content. In my code so far I've done something like this in the render-method :
request.setContentType( .... content-type set based on extension of file to serve )
f = open(somefile) while 1: d = f.read(2048) # what's the correct size to read if not d: break request.write(d) request.finish() return
zow! You should be using static.File. Just return static.File('/path/to/binary.file') from your getChild, or putChild it there in the first place. It will figure out the mime type by looking it up in your mime database (/etc/mime.types), and if it's not found in there, there's a dict of basic mime types that's hard-coded in, so there's a good chance you won't have to set the mime-type. If you do, you can just pass the defaultType parameter to the constructor, i.e., static.File('/path/foo', defaultType='application/x-octet-stream') (or whatever the type is). static.File is much better suited to the purpose because it's already written :), and it doesn't block (well, it does a better job at not-blocking, anyway), which your snippet does.
It seem to return the data OK, it's visible in the browser, but exceptions are raised in the server. How do I close this connection the right way? Should this be used with deferred or something like that? The files can be huge in size.
The exceptions were probably raised because you didn't return anything meaningful from render -- if you're going to be dealing with the request directly (calling .write and .finish on it), then you need to return server.NOT_DONE_YET (assuming `server' was imported with `from twisted.web import server'). For future reference, please show us your tracebacks.
PS! From recent postings in this list is seems as if Twisted doesn't support compression of content, using gzip etc. Is this true? This would speed up things considerably. I implemented this in my previous webserver-project using BaseHTTPServer and on big files the increase in speed was impressive. Compressing HTML/Plain text/XML etc., just files known to be based in plain text, would be a great start.
Patches accepted >:) -- Twisted | Christopher Armstrong: International Man of Twistery Radix | Release Manager, Twisted Project ---------+ http://twistedmatrix.com/users/radix.twistd/