Confused about path settings with Tornado server - python-3.x

Question

I'm using bower to grab the .css and .js files for my website.
The directory structure looks like this:
server.py
bower_components/
templates/
All of the HTML templates (and some partials templates that I use with AngularJS) are located in templates. Stuff installed by bower is located in bower_components. How can I define template_path, static_path and static_url_prefix settings so that I can link into files in those directories?
If I use relative paths like:
href="bower_components/bootstrap/dist/css/bootstrap.css"
I will get 404 error. No handlers can be found so the error is thrown. It seems that Tornado forces me to use static_url function on my templates? Do I really have to use it? It looks very ugly when mixed with AngularJS. I have tried setting static_path to os.path.dirname(file) and tried using static_url but that gives me exception:
Exception: You must define the 'static_path' setting in your application to use static_url
How should I configure this? I can't believe I have wasted hours trying to figure this out already... :(

Answer 1

Did you try to use the StaticFileHandler? You can use something like this:
import os
import tornado.web
import tornado.ioloop
if __name__ == '__main__':
app = tornado.web.Application([
(r"/(.*)", tornado.web.StaticFileHandler, {"path": os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__))}),
])
app.listen(8888)
tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start()

Answer 2

You must combine staticfilehandler with some path variables you put in the settings variable.
http://tornado.readthedocs.org/en/latest/web.html
It's pretty easy. You can name as many settings variables as you want.

Answer 3

It turned out I needed to use tornado.web.StaticFileHandler class with path mapped to it. This is how I configured my tornado.web.Application:
class TornadoApp(tornado.web.Application):
def __init__(self):
# static file regex patterns matched with the actual folders here
static_handlers = {
'/bower_components/(.*)': 'bower_components',
'/templates/partials/(.*)': 'templates/partials'
}
handlers = [
('/', IndexHandler),
('/products', ProductHandler),
]
# append the handlers with content from static_handlers dictionary
for r, p in static_handlers.items():
handlers.append((r, tornado.web.StaticFileHandler, {'path': p}))
settings = {
'template_path': "templates",
'debug': True
}
tornado.web.Application.__init__(self, handlers, **settings)