Static CSS Files in the App Engine

If you link to a CSS with, say href="/css/style.css" then the browser is going to do a GET /css/style.css. But, since you are running the app engine this means that, by default, this will go to your Python file where it will look to see if there is a handler defined for /css/style.css.

Since our CSS files are static we don't want the python code to be called to fetch them. We just want the webapp2 to serve these as old-fashioned static files. To do this you need to edit your app.yaml and tell it which files or directories you want to be static. Read the docs on Static File and Directory handlers for the details. Basically, you add something like:

- url: /css
  static_dir: css

to your app.yaml file.