starlette/docs/staticfiles.md

Starlette also includes a StaticFiles class for serving files in a given directory:

StaticFiles

Signature: StaticFiles(directory=None, packages=None, check_dir=True)

• directory - A string or os.Pathlike denoting a directory path.
• packages - A list of strings of python packages.
• html - Run in HTML mode. Automatically loads index.html for directories if such file exist.
• check_dir - Ensure that the directory exists upon instantiation. Defaults to True.

You can combine this ASGI application with Starlette's routing to provide comprehensive static file serving.

from starlette.applications import Starlette
from starlette.routing import Mount
from starlette.staticfiles import StaticFiles


routes = [
    ...
    Mount('/static', app=StaticFiles(directory='static'), name="static"),
]

app = Starlette(routes=routes)

Static files will respond with "404 Not found" or "405 Method not allowed" responses for requests which do not match. In HTML mode if 404.html file exists it will be shown as 404 response.

The packages option can be used to include "static" directories contained within a python package. The Python "bootstrap4" package is an example of this.

from starlette.applications import Starlette
from starlette.routing import Mount
from starlette.staticfiles import StaticFiles


routes=[
    ...
    Mount('/static', app=StaticFiles(directory='static', packages=['bootstrap4']), name="static"),
]

app = Starlette(routes=routes)

You may prefer to include static files directly inside the "static" directory rather than using Python packaging to include static files, but it can be useful for bundling up reusable components.