Briefcase Static Web Template

A Cookiecutter template for building Python apps that will run as statically-served web pages

Using this template

The easiest way to use this project is to not use it at all - at least, not directly. Briefcase is a tool that uses this template, rolling it out using data extracted from a pyproject.toml configuration file.

However, if you do want use this template directly...

1. Install cookiecutter. This is a tool used to bootstrap complex project templates:

   $ pip install cookiecutter
   

2. Run cookiecutter on the template:

   $ cookiecutter https://github.com/beeware/briefcase-web-static-template
   

   This will ask you for a number of details of your application, including the name of your application (which should be a valid PyPI identifier), and the Formal Name of your application (the full name you use to describe your app). The remainder of these instructions will assume a name of my-project, and a formal name of My Project.

3. Build a wheel for your project, and add it to www/static/wheels.

4. Add wheels for any additional project requirements to www/static/wheels.

5. Add a file named www/pyscript.toml to configure the PyScript interpreter. At a minimum, it should include a packages declaration that includes all the wheels in the www/static/wheels folder.

If you've done this correctly, a project with a formal name of My Project, with an app name of my-project should have a directory structure that looks something like:

My Project/
    app/
        ...
    www/
        static/
            css/
                briefcase.css
            wheels/
                my_project-0.0.1-py3-none-any.whl
                other-1.2.3-py3-none-any.whl
            favicon.png
        index.html
        pyscript.toml
    briefcase.toml

with www/pyscript.toml containing:

packages = [
    "my_project-0.0.1-py3-none-any.whl",
    "other-1.2.3-py3-none-any.whl",
]

You should now be able to serve the www folder as a static website:

$ python -m httpd.server --directory www

Next steps

Of course, running Python code isn't very interesting by itself - you'll be able to output to the web console, but that won't be visible to most users.

When the page loads, it will attempt to run my_project as a module (i.e., the equivalent of running python -m my_project from the command line).

To do something interesting, you'll need to add some DOM objects. You can use PyScript APIs to manipulator the DOM.

Alternatively, you could use a cross-platform widget toolkit that supports the web as a target (such as Toga) to provide a GUI for your application.