includes with SimpleHTTPServer?

Question

I have begun using the Python SimpleHTTPServer in Mac OS X Bash to help with front-end templating rather than MAMP. I like the simplicity but wondered if there is a way to use includes for embedding repeatable parts of the page (mainly header/footer)?

I'd use PHP for this normally but I don't think that's an option with SimpleHTTPServer so i'd like to know if there any other ways to do this easily?

Answer 1

You can do anything you want inside the request's do_GET() method, including parsing it for include directives as in the following code outline:

class IncludeHandler(SimpleHTTPRequestHandler):

    def do_GET(self):
        # self.path is the requested file
        complete_file = process_included_files(self.path)  # include the included files 

        # serve the file. These lines come
        # straight from the http.server source code

        self.send_response(200)
        self.send_header("Content-type", "text/html") # or whatever the mime type is
        fs = os.fstat(complete_file.fileno())
        self.send_header("Content-Length", str(fs[6]))
        self.end_headers()

        self.copyfile(complete_file, self.wfile)