Read a file on App Engine with Python?

Question

Is it possible to open a file on GAE just to read its contents and get the last modified tag?

I get a IOError: [Errno 13] file not accessible: I know that i cannot delete or update but i believe reading should be possible Has anyone faced a similar problem?

os.stat(f,'r').st_mtim

Answer 1

You can read files, but they're on Goooogle's wacky GAE filesystem so you have to use a relative path. I just whipped up a quick app with a main.py file and test.txt in the same folder. Don't forget the 'e' on st_mtime.

import os
from google.appengine.ext import webapp
from google.appengine.ext.webapp import util


class MainHandler(webapp.RequestHandler):

  def get(self):
    path = os.path.join(os.path.split(__file__)[0], 'test.txt')

    self.response.out.write(os.stat(path).st_mtime)


def main():
  application = webapp.WSGIApplication([('/', MainHandler)],
                                       debug=True)
  util.run_wsgi_app(application)


if __name__ == '__main__':
  main()

Answer 2

You've probably declared the file as static in app.yaml. Static files are not available to your application; if you need to serve them both as static files and read them as application files, you'll need to include 2 copies in your project (ideally using symlinks, so you don't actually have to maintain an actual copy.)