How to serve Files in a Directory from App Engine Standard Python Environment

Question

For a project, our team is using the app engine python environment to host several scripts that are scraping a website to store data in the form of various json files and directories of images. We want to expose these directories to a url (Ex: /img/01.jpg in the app engine directory to "sample.appspot.com/img/01.jpg"). The reason is that we want to be able to download these files directly to a react-native mobile app using the fetch api. Is this feasable, efficient, and quick using app engine and how? If not what combination of google cloud services could we use to achieve the same functionality and how?

Answer 1

You could use Google Cloud Storage to store your files:

• (for flexible environment) Application code
• (for standard environment) Writing to Cloud Storage

Once stored they're pretty much static files, so for serving them you have 2 options:

• serve them as static content, directly from GCS, see, for example Serving from Cloud Storage.

  I'd suspect this would be faster. Your app's environment doesn't matter, since it's not even involved.

• serve them dynamically, through your app's URLs & handlers, with your app reading them from GCS. See, for example:

  • (for flexible environment) Serving from your application
  • (for standard environment) Reading from Cloud Storage