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Django FileNotFoundError in a view when returning HTML using codecs

I am creating a view in Django that returns a static HTML page, and my code for that view is as follows:

from django.shortcuts import render
from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.shortcuts import render_to_response
import codecs

# Basic HTTP response that returns my html index
# To call this view, map it to a URLconf

def index(request):

    # When a request is called, return my index.html

    html = codecs.open("index.html", "r")
    return HttpResponse(html.read())

When I fire up the Django dev. server and navigate to my app, instead of the rendering of index.html that I expect, I am confronted with a FileNotFoundError at /myapp/ as well as [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'index.html'. I know for a fact that index.html is a real file in the same directory as myviews.py, and I have also tried debugging by opening a debug.txt in the same directory and returning that, but with the same result. When I open the python shell in the same directory and try to open the same file, it works without a hitch. Any insight would be appreciated, as I am thouroughly stumped.

Solution

  • If you want to open a file from the same directory as your view.py file, use the following:

    html = open(os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__)) + 'index.html', "r")