Serve Static File

Community wiki Sysadmins
1

Want to serve a static file at the root of your Discourse server?

Here’s what to do. In the bottom of your app.yml file, down in the custom commands section, do something like this:

## Remember, this is YAML syntax - you can only have one block with a name
run:
  - exec: echo "Beginning of custom commands"
  - file:
     path: /var/www/discourse/public/myfile.txt
     chmod: "+r"
     contents: |
       Stuff that's in the file goes here.
  - exec: echo "End of custom commands"

And . /launcher rebuild app
The file will then be accessible as http://yourserver.com/myfile.txt

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2

What is an actual example of where one would want to do this?

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3

Personally i find this really useful. Not to mention that this kind of static file, gives you way more opportunities to use your imagination, files, maybe other website service that you can run as static – etc :smiley:

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4

I’m wondering what “stuff” limitations there are.

contents: |
       Stuff that's in the file goes here.

I imagine simple text strings work well enough, though I also imagine for this to be more useful, markup, links, images, etc. would be desired. I suspect that the more closely “stuff” approaches being a web page the more difficult it would be to not break.

@pfaffman what is your use case and what degree of complexity have you been able to do successfully?

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7

This can also help verifying ownership of the site, e.g. with Google Webmaster Tools :slight_smile:

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8

Site ownership verification can be done with a meta tag in the head as well.

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9

Well, you’ve seen the actual examples that I know about. There are ways not to need it, but I’ve wanted to do this a few times and finally bothered to figure it out. :slight_smile:

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10

Very interesting and useful. Can this be tweaked to allow many files to be dumped into a folder for access? Say you want to make /var/www/discourse/public/img so that yourserver.tld/img/step_1.png can be served up easily and any number of subsequent files that are scp’d or uploaded in some way to the server?

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11

Why would you use an application server to serve files? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to store and serve them elsewhere?

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Not in my particular use case. I would prefer to do this for certain files that are specifically useful for admin purposes.

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13

I‘m using Cloudflare worker for this purpose:

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14

What about paid hosting? Any way to achieve this?

15

I need to verify domain ownership with semrush for my project. I do not want others who use semrush to audit my site.

16

will try this method later on if original method didn’t work :slight_smile:

I prefer what the doctor says :smiley:

1 Like