Ktor has built-in support for serving static content. This can come in useful when you want to serve style sheets, scripts, images, etc.

Specifying Files and Folders

Using the static function, we can tell Ktor that we want certain URIs to be treated as static content and also define where the content resides. All content is relative to the current working directory. See Defining a custom root folder to set a different root.

routing {
    static("static") {
        files("css") 
    }
}

The example above tells ktor that any request to the URI /static is to be treated as static content. The files("css") defines the folder under which these files are located - anything that is in the folder css will be served. In essence, this means that a request such as

/static/styles.css will serve the file css/styles.css.

In addition to folders, we can also include specific files using file, which can optionally take a second parameter that maps to the actual physical filename, if it is different.

routing {
    static("static") {
        files("css")
        files("js")
        file("image.png")
        file("random.txt", "image.png")
        default("index.html")
    }
}

We can also have default files that can be served using default. For instance, on calling

/static with no filename, index.html will be served.

Defining a custom root folder

To specify a different root folder, one other than the working directory, we set the value of staticRootFolder which expects a type File.

static("custom") {
    staticRootFolder = File("/system/folder/docs")
    files("public")
}

Defining subroutes

We can also define sub-routes, i.e. /static/themes for instance

static("static") {
    files("css")
    static("themes") {
        files("data")
    }
}

Serving embedded resources

If you embed your static content as resources into your application, you can serve them right from there using the resource and resources functions:

static("static") {
    resources("css")
    resource("favicon.ico")
}

There is also defaultResource similar to default for serving a default page for a folder, and staticBasePackage similar to staticRootFolder for specifying a base resource package for static content.

Handling Errors

If the requested content is not found in any route the 404 Not Found will be produced.

Customising Content Types

When files are served, the content type is determined from the file extension, using ContentType.defaultForFile(file). The data corresponding to each file type is obtained from the mimelist.csv resource file which is located in ktor-server-core.

Under the covers

The function static is defined as

fun Route.static(remotePath: String, configure: Route.() -> Unit) = route(remotePath, configure)

which is essentially just another route definition.

Handling HEAD requests in static content

Ktor do not handle HEAD requests by default, thus the static content feature do not handle HEAD requests either. To automatically handle HEAD requests for each GET route you can install the AutoHeadResponse feature.

fun Application.main() {
    // ...
    install(AutoHeadResponse) 
    // ...
}

Not handling HEAD requests by default, means that if you use curl -I or its curl --head alias to a GET route of your Ktor backend without installing the AutoHeadResponse feature, it would return a 404 Not Found.