How to serve static files in Flask

Flask automatically serves static files from a static folder in your project directory. If you need to serve a specific file or use a custom route, you can use the send_from_directory function or app.send_static_file().

Here's an example of how to serve a static file called myfile.txt that is stored in the static folder:

Custom route for static files

from flask import Flask, send_from_directory

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/static/<path:path>')
def serve_static(path):
    return send_from_directory('static', path)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(debug=True)

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You can then access the file at http://localhost:5000/static/myfile.txt.

Generating URLs with url_for

You can also use the url_for function to generate a URL for a static file. For example:

from flask import Flask, url_for

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/')
def index():
    return url_for('static', filename='myfile.txt')

This will return the URL path /static/myfile.txt. Note that send_from_directory safely prevents directory traversal by default. The url_for result is typically used in HTML templates rather than returned directly from a route function.