With Flask, how can I serve robots.txt and sitemap.xml as static files?

Question

I've read on quiet a few places that serving static files should be left to the server, for example in a couple of the answers on this SO question. But I use the OpenShift PaaS, and can't figure out how to modify the .htaccess file there.

I came across this piece of code that serves the sitemap from a template. I did that on my app for both the sitemap, and robots.txt, like so -

@app.route("/sitemap.xml")
def sitemap_xml():
    response= make_response(render_template("sitemap.xml"))
    response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'application/xml'
    return response

@app.route("/robots.txt")
def robots_txt():
    return render_template("robots.txt")

Is there any harm in this, or is my approach okay?

Answer 1

Put robots.txt and sitemap.xml into your app's static directory and define this view:

from flask import Flask, request, send_from_directory

@app.route('/robots.txt')
@app.route('/sitemap.xml')
def static_from_root():
    return send_from_directory(app.static_folder, request.path[1:])