Although the SWI-Prolog web-server is intended to serve documents that need to be computed dynamically, serving plain files is sometimes necessary. There are several options to serve files.

Locating physical files

Before we can serve files, we first need to be able to find them on the file-system. This is a general topic, but we discuss it here because it is especially relevant to serving files. There are three options:

1. Specify absolute file names (i.e., files that begin with / (or <drive>:/ in windows). This is typically a bad idea as it makes moving your server to another environment complicated.
2. Specify relative file names, where the server's working directory is the basis. This is much better than using absolute path, but still makes moving things around complicated.
3. Use file-path mechanism implemented by absolute_file_name/3 (search over a path) and file_search_path/2 (define paths). This is a bit similar to the PATH variable used to find executables in operating systems. It allows for multiple paths and the specification may be non-deterministic. This non-determinism can be used to find files in multiple physical locations using the same specification. A good example of this can be found in serve_files_in_directory/2.

Code snippets

All code snippets below assume a running server and the library(http/http_dispatch) loaded. This means that running these examples require a file with this content to be loaded (8080 is the port; change as you please).

:- use_module(library(http/thread_httpd)).
:- use_module(library(http/http_dispatch)).

:- initialization
      http_server(http_dispatch, [port(8080)]).

All snippets are supposed to be loaded from a source-file, as opposed to be typed in the console.

Serve a few files

Sometimes you have a fully dynamic server that needs to serve, for example, a few images or CSS files. You can solve this directly using http_reply_file/3. The example below serves /favicon.ico from the local file favicon.ico.

:- http_handler('/favicon.ico', http_reply_file('favicon.ico', []), []).

The predicate http_reply_file/3 (by default) deals with caching (If-modified-since) and deals with different content-type (mime-type) using the predicate file_mime_type/2.

Serving many `server support' files

Bigger servers often have lots of static files that contain images, CSS, JavaScript, etc. A good way to facilitate this is using serve_files_in_directory/2 from library(http/http_server_files). This predicate assumes aliases for searching files (see above) and for specifying HTTP locations as defined by library(http/http_path).

In the next example, we create a serve that serves images on /images/... from a directory /srv/htdocs/icons/.... Note that this server has no means for browsing by the user. It answers the file or 404, which is typically precisely what we want for server resource files.

First, we specify a path alias for the location handled by the server.

:- use_module(library(http/http_path)).

http:location(images,	root(images), []).

Next, we specify a file alias for the location on the file-system. We do this in two steps: (1) we define an alias for our entire document-set and (2) then we define the target icons alias relative to this central alias. This two-step approach allows for updating the server to a modified environment easily. Note that the document_root alias can be in a different Prolog file (e.g., a global configuration file).

:- multifile user:file_search_path/2.

user:file_search_path(document_root,	'/srv/htdocs').
user:file_search_path(icons,		document_root(icons)).

Finally, serve_files_in_directory combines the two aliases. It is common to use the same alias name for both the HTTP path and file. We used two different ones in this example to clarify their roles.

:- http_handler(images(.), serve_files_in_directory(icons), [prefix]).

Serving a user-browsable directory hierarchy

If you want to give the user access to a set of files, the above is unsuitable because it does not support directory browsing. SWI-Prolog 5.11.29 and 5.10.6 provide library(http/http_files) to solve this problem. The predicate http_reply_from_files/3 combines http_reply_file/3 with http_reply_dirindex/3. Here is the complete code to serve files to a server running at port 8080 from the local directory. Note that the server disallows access to ../, etc., to protect sensitive files on the system.

:- use_module(library(http/thread_httpd)).
:- use_module(library(http/http_dispatch)).
:- use_module(library(http/http_files)).

:- http_handler(root(.), http_reply_from_files('.', []), [prefix]).

:- initialization
        http_server(http_dispatch, [port(8080)]).

See also

- Older versions may download http_files.pl from http://www.swi-prolog.org/git/packages/http.git/blob/HEAD:/http_files.pl

- PWP.md describes Prolog Well-formed Pages, a form of dynamic HTML service.