# Serving Static Content From a Directory

The goal of this example is to show you how to serve static content from a filesystem. First, we need to import some objects:

- `Site`, an `IProtocolFactory` which glues a listening server port (`IListeningPort`) to the `HTTPChannel` implementation:

      from twisted.web.server import Site

- `File`, an `IResource` which glues the HTTP protocol implementation to the filesystem:

      from twisted.web.static import File

- The `reactor`, which drives the whole process, actually accepting TCP connections and moving bytes into and out of them:

      from twisted.internet import reactor

- And the `endpoints` module, which gives us tools for, amongst other things, creating listening sockets:

      from twisted.internet import endpoints

Next, we create an instance of the File resource pointed at the directory to serve:

    resource = File("/tmp")

Then we create an instance of the Site factory with that resource:

    factory = Site(resource)

Now we glue that factory to a TCP port:

    endpoint = endpoints.TCP4ServerEndpoint(reactor, 8080)
    endpoint.listen(factory)

Finally, we start the reactor so it can make the program work:

    reactor.run()

And that’s it. Here’s the complete program:

    from twisted.web.server import Site
    from twisted.web.static import File
    from twisted.internet import reactor, endpoints

    resource = File('/tmp')
    factory = Site(resource)
    endpoint = endpoints.TCP4ServerEndpoint(reactor, 8080)
    endpoint.listen(factory)
    reactor.run()

Bonus example! For those times when you don’t actually want to write a new program, the above implemented functionality is one of the things the command line `twistd` tool can do. In this case, the command

    twistd -n web --path /tmp

will accomplish the same thing as the above server. See helper programs in the Twisted Core documentation for more information on using `twistd`.