TL;DR

Flask already serves static files by default, hence complying with the default structure allows the setup to be very easy.

Motivation

Very fast setup of a local web server
One deployment artefact can contain static and dynamic parts

Prerequisites

Installed python
Flask library is available

Approach

Default setup

Flask already serves static files by default. This Hello World example already serves static files on http://127.0.0.1:5000/static/.

from flask import Flask

app = Flask(__name__)

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

Important are the parameters static_folder and static_url_path.

static_folder is the path to the folder containing the static files. The path can be relative to the application root_path or absolute. The constructor sets static_folder by default to ‘static’.

static_url_path is the path on which the static content is hosted defaulting to the value of static_folder.

These default values are set implicitly

app = Flask(__name__, static_folder='static', static_url_path=None)

Host a simple website

To illustrate we create a folder called ‘static’ and add an example html file. The directory structure should look like this:

static/index.html file

<html>
  <body>
    <h1>Hello from the static folder!</h1>
  </body>
</html>

Running the application and opening http://127.0.0.1:5000/static/index.html we can see the example website.

Change the root path

Personally, I prefer to host my website directly on the root path. To achieve this, static_url_path is set to ‘’.

Overwrite the default parameter

app = Flask(__name__, static_url_path='')

Restart the application, and we can see the improved paths at http://127.0.0.1:5000/index.html.