Python Bottle app in /app1 - am I forced to prepend "/app1" to all routes?

I developed a bottle app locally using run() with routes that all start with "/" per the tutorial and now I want to put it on a real server.

Docs at http://bottlepy.org/docs/dev/deployment.html suggest to use WSGIScriptAlias / /var/www/yourapp/app.wsgi, but I don't want the root of my site to be handled by a WSGI app. I want the root of the site to be handled by raw Apache, and only URLs under /app1 to be handled by WSGI.

So I set mine up as WSGIScriptAlias /app1 /var/www/app1/app1.py. It runs in the sense that I can see what I defined in the .py file under route('/') when I browse to server://app1, but none of the hyperlinks have /app1 prepended and the browser can't pick up my css files from /var/www/app1/css, etc.

Subject says it all. Am I forced to prepend "/app1" to all routes when I want the app to live in a subdirectory?

I was trying to future-proof myself because I foresee making /app2, /app3, etc. in future.

EDIT 1: For the sake of experimentation, I did try prepending /app1 to all routes. The result was even worse: every single address I try to browse to under /app1 gives a 404 error.

Solution

So to attempt this, I took a boilerplate code from below repo

https://github.com/arsho/bottle-bootstrap

And used that as a base. I figured out that it is possible to mount your app on a base url, if you follow few simple rules

Each HTML that you serve should define a base path using the HEAD tag. Like <base href="{{ APP_MOUNT_PATH }}">
The static references which needs to be relative to the base path should not start with / or ./. Like <script type="text/javascript" src="static/jquery.min.js"></script>. This will make sure the path is generated using the mount path your provided in the base tag
Take the mount path from the environment variables when starting the app

So here are the updated files

index.tpl

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
    <meta name="description" content="Bottle web project template">
    <meta name="author" content="datamate">
    <link rel="icon" href="static/favicon.ico"> 
    <base href="{{ APP_MOUNT_PATH }}">
    <title>Project</title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="static/bootstrap.min.css">
    <script type="text/javascript" src="static/jquery.min.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="static/bootstrap.min.js"></script>  
</head>
<body>
    <!-- Static navbar -->
    <nav class="navbar navbar-default navbar-static-top">
        <div class="container">
            <div class="row">
                <div class="navbar-header">
                    <button type="button" class="navbar-toggle collapsed" data-toggle="collapse" data-target="#navbar" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="navbar">
                        <span class="sr-only">Toggle navigation</span>
                        <span class="icon-bar"></span>
                        <span class="icon-bar"></span>
                        <span class="icon-bar"></span>
                    </button>
                    <a class="navbar-brand" href="#">Project</a>
                </div>
                <div id="navbar" class="navbar-collapse collapse">
                    <ul class="nav navbar-nav navbar-right">
                        <li><a href="navbar/">Home</a></li>
                        <li><a href="./">Github</a></li>
                        <li><a href="navbar-fixed-top/">Stackoverflow</a></li>
                    </ul>
                </div><!--/.nav-collapse -->
            </div>
        </div>
    </nav>
    <div class="container">
        <div class="row">
            <div class="jumbotron">
            <h2>Welcome from {{data["developer_name"]}}</h2>
                <p>This is a template showcasing the optional theme stylesheet included in Bootstrap. Use it as a starting point to create something more unique by building on or modifying it.</p>
            </div>
        </div>
        <!--./row-->
        <div class="row">
            <hr>
            <footer>
                <p>&copy; 2017 {{data["developer_organization"]}}.</p>
            </footer>           
        </div>
    </div> 
    <!-- /container -->
</body>
</html>

app.py

from bottle import Bottle, run, \
     template, debug, static_file

import os, sys

dirname = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__))

app = Bottle()
debug(True)

@app.route('/static/<filename:re:.*\.css>')
def send_css(filename):
    print("Sending", filename, dirname)
    return static_file(filename, root=dirname+'/static/asset/css')

@app.route('/static/<filename:re:.*\.js>')
def send_js(filename):
    print("Sending", filename, dirname)
    return static_file(filename, root=dirname+'/static/asset/js')

@app.route('/')
def index():
    data = {"developer_name":"Tarun Lalwani",
            "developer_organization":""}
    return template('index', data = data)

@app.route('/tarun/')
def tarun():
    data = {"developer_name":"Tarun Lalwani",
            "developer_organization":""}
    return template('index', data = data)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    run(app, host='localhost', port = 8080)

app.wsgi

import os
os.chdir(os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__)))

import bottle
from app import app
application = bottle.default_app()

mount_path = os.getenv("APP_MOUNT_PATH", "/")
application.config['APP_MOUNT_PATH'] = mount_path

application.mount(mount_path,  app)
bottle.BaseTemplate.defaults['APP_MOUNT_PATH'] = mount_path

And then I ran it using uwsgi

[uwsgi]
http = 127.0.0.1:3031
chdir = /Users/tarunlalwani/Documents/Projects/SO/bottle-bootstrap
pythonpath = .
env = APP_MOUNT_PATH=/app2/
wsgi-file = app.wsgi
processes = 1
threads = 1
stats = 127.0.0.1:9191
; logto = ./uwsgi.log

Now the app loads fine at http://localhost:3031/app2/ and ``http://localhost:3031/app2/tarun` which shows that base path works for both types of url

All the code is available at below repo for your convenience

https://github.com/tarunlalwani/python-bottle-base-url