Multiple directories in StaticFiles

[taoufik07]

The feature request is to be able to serve different directories under the same route.

The StaticFiles app only allows serving from one directory, so we can't have have multiple apps under the same route.

Suggestions :

1- Add an add_directory method to StaticFiles app, to allow adding multiple directories to the the same StaticFiles app and it can be used like so :

static_app = StaticFiles(directory="static")
static_app.add_directory("another_static_dir")

We can also add add_directories which accepts a list of directories

• I've made a PR for the add_directory Allow adding directories to StatiFiles app #626

2- Allow passing a list of directories in init, I know it's not a good idea to change the api :/, and to avoid that one way could be adding a kwarg directories: List[str], I'm also aware it's not a good idea :3 (even worse) to expose two ways of doing things directory and directoriesbut the way of implementing it should be discussed, ofc if accepted.

[tomchristie]

Good summary on this issue, yup!
I'm not really sure what we want the API for this to look like, bit conflicted.

[taoufik07]

We can now add the add_directory, and later discuss how to pass multiple directories in the constructor, if we wanna allow it and change the existing API ofc.

[as-dg]

Any news on this?

[Kludex]

@aminalaee you've been creating some PRs around StaticFiles. Do you think this makes sense?

[aminalaee]

@Kludex yeah. It does make sense. There is no conclusion about the API for it.

Honestly I don't think this is very nice:

static_app = StaticFiles(directory="static")
static_app.add_directory("another_static_dir")

We did handle multiple directories for third party packages:

StaticFiles(packages=[('bootstrap4', 'static')])

But for local directories I think we can work around it.
Maybe later on we can change the signature to handle directories too.

[Kludex]

Could we accept both str and List[str] on directory? Is that bad? Or should we create directories and make it mutual exclusive with directory?

[tomchristie]

Closing with the same rationale as #1214

There's plenty decent enough ways users can do this if they're really keen. Eg. subclass StaticFiles and override the get_directories method.

It's okay for us to just default to one directory + packages.

[pomarec]

fyi, I used the following solution :

import typing

from starlette.staticfiles import PathLike, StaticFiles


class MultiStaticFiles(StaticFiles):
    def __init__(self, directories: typing.List[PathLike] = [], **kwargs) -> None:
        super().__init__(**kwargs)
        self.all_directories = self.all_directories + directories