How to handle files like robots.txt and favicon.ico under nginx?

vsajip

On Apache, this can be done on a per-directory basis using .htaccess. What's the best approach for doing this with a standard Opalstack Django webapp? I normally do this using alias or similar when I have control of the nginx configuration, but I want to use the shared nginx if possible. I suppose one could add a site route specifically for these, but is there a better way?

johns

Put it in urls.py like other Django routes.

vsajip

johns Ah, I know you can do that, thanks. I meant if there was some other way to use nginx to serve these, as these are static files expected to be found at the site root.

nathan

Example (using old style URLs before "path" was a thing):
url(r'^{robots.txt',

TemplateView.as_view(template_name='robots.txt',

content_type='text/plain'),

name='robots.txt'),

And then just stick robots.txt into the templates folder.}

sean

vsajip At this time you'll need to do it in your Django setup as John suggested. The reason is that since you're serving your Django app from the root of the site, we can't tell the front-end to serve static stuff from that same URI.

Not saying its impossible, we're just not set up to do it that way yet. I'll open an internal ticket to see if we can implement in the future.

webtweakers

Out of curiosity, is there a better way to serve /favicon.ico by now?

Some browsers are ignoring the set of html tags, like:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/static/favicon.ico">

nick

webtweakers

It's been a while for me but I think it needs to be 'rel=icon' (EDIT: looks like both work). And I suppose 'type' and 'sizes' are now used for specificity/compatibility. The wikipedia article on the topic is also quite interesting, has a lot to say.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon
Ref: https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_link_sizes.asp

webtweakers

nick
I know, I have a set of those icon tags, for specific devices, etc.

Problem is that some browsers still request /favicon.ico, from the root of the domain. As @sean said, Django is being served from the root, so can't have both. The only option seems to be @nathan's suggestion.

I was just wondering if, by now, there is a better solution.

sean

webtweakers you can uwsgi's static routing capabilities, eg you could add this to your uwsgi.ini:

route = /favicon.ico static:/home/shelluser/apps/appname/favicon.ico

In that setup the file will be served directly by your uwsgi instance but without going through Django's template machinery.

webtweakers

That's exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. Except, I'm using Gunicorn, where this route-functionality does not exist, I think. I suppose this would be one good reason to switch to using uwsgi.

sean

webtweakers another approach would be to run your own Nginx server on the back end, using a port assigned via a proxy port app and configured to serve whatever static assets you need and to proxy everything else to gunicorn.

Probably too much work for a favicon in my opinion 🙂