How to build an offline web app using Flask?
- by Rafael Alencar
I'm prototyping an idea for a website that will use the HTML5 offline application cache for certain purposes. The website will be built with Python and Flask and that's where my main problem comes from: I'm working with those two for the first time, so I'm having a hard time getting the manifest file to work as expected.
The issue is that I'm getting 404's from the static files included in the manifest file. The manifest itself seems to be downloaded correctly, but the files that it points to are not. This is what is spit out in the console when loading the page:
Creating Application Cache with manifest http://127.0.0.1:5000/static/manifest.appcache offline-app:1
Application Cache Checking event offline-app:1
Application Cache Downloading event offline-app:1
Application Cache Progress event (0 of 2) http://127.0.0.1:5000/style.css offline-app:1
Application Cache Error event: Resource fetch failed (404) http://127.0.0.1:5000/style.css
The error is in the last line.
When the appcache fails even once, it stops the process completely and the offline cache doesn't work.
This is how my files are structured:
sandbox
offline-app
offline-app.py
static
manifest.appcache
script.js
style.css
templates
offline-app.html
This is the content of offline-app.py:
from flask import Flask, render_template
app = Flask(__name__)
@app.route('/offline-app')
def offline_app():
return render_template('offline-app.html')
if __name__ == '__main__':
app.run(host='0.0.0.0', debug=True)
This is what I have in offline-app.html:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html manifest="{{ url_for('static', filename='manifest.appcache') }}">
<head>
<title>Offline App Sandbox - main page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Welcome to the main page for the Offline App Sandbox!</h1>
<p>Some placeholder text</p>
</body>
</html>
This is my manifest.appcache file:
CACHE MANIFEST
/style.css
/script.js
I've tried having the manifest file in all different ways I could think of:
CACHE MANIFEST
/static/style.css
/static/script.js
or
CACHE MANIFEST
/offline-app/static/style.css
/offline-app/static/script.js
None of these worked. The same error was returned every time.
I'm certain the issue here is how the server is serving up the files listed in the manifest. Those files are probably being looked up in the wrong place, I guess. I either should place them somewhere else or I need something different in the cache manifest, but I have no idea what. I couldn't find anything online about having HTML5 offline applications with Flask.
Is anyone able to help me out?
