Error 500 while serving favicon with CherryPy

Question

My CherryPy app started throwing error 500 (see traceback below) when serving favicon. At first only a few computers had the problem, now all the computers get the error. I don't think I have changed anything on the Python app, perhaps something has changed on the computer configuration.

I am not able to debug the error because it does not reproduce on my development computer. On my computer it does not even reach the line where it crashes on the production server.

Here is the configuration (other parameters are added by other modules, this is the starting configuration that takes care of favicon):

config = {'global': {'server.socket_host':  '0.0.0.0',
                     'server.socket_port':  80,
                     'log.error_file':      'log\\web.log',
                     'log.access_file':     'log\\access.log'},
          '/favicon.ico': {'tools.staticfile.on':       True,
                           'tools.staticfile.filename': os.path.dirname(__file__) + '\\favicon.ico'}}

Here is the traceback:

[08/Jan/2016:13:55:14] HTTP
Request Headers:
  ACCEPT-LANGUAGE: en-US,en;q=0.8
  COOKIE: DocFinder_Id=2dde47f7-c679-4c12-a5c5-0a8a214c47d6
  CONNECTION: keep-alive
  REFERER: http://intelliweb.universecorp.com/doc/tmp/808184425.pdf
  ACCEPT-ENCODING: gzip, deflate
  USER-AGENT: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.106 Safari/537.36
  Remote-Addr: 192.1.1.120
  ACCEPT: */*
  HOST: intelliweb.universecorp.com
[08/Jan/2016:13:55:14] HTTP Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Python34\lib\site-packages\cherrypy\_cprequest.py", line 670, in respond
    response.body = self.handler()
  File "C:\Python34\lib\site-packages\cherrypy\lib\encoding.py", line 212, in __call__
    self.body = self.oldhandler(*args, **kwargs)
  File "C:\Python34\lib\site-packages\cherrypy\_cpdispatch.py", line 61, in __call__
    return self.callable(*self.args, **self.kwargs)
  File "C:\Python34\lib\site-packages\cherrypy\_cptools.py", line 175, in handle_func
    handled = self.callable(*args, **self._merged_args(kwargs))
TypeError: staticfile() got multiple values for argument 'filename'

192.1.1.120 - - [08/Jan/2016:13:55:14] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 500 1468 "http://intelliweb.universecorp.com/doc/tmp/808184425.pdf" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.106 Safari/537.36"

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 09 '16 at 01:51

Try changing this line:

'tools.staticfile.filename': os.path.dirname(__file__) + '\\favicon.ico'

to

'tools.staticfile.filename': os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'favicon.ico')

Another way is to serve your favicon from your html (in the header section):

<link href="yourpath/favicon.ico" rel="icon" type="image/x-icon" />

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:23

misakm's answer was not correct, but helped me in the debugging: the problem was that __file__ was absolute on the development computer and relative on the production one. I found the reason here:

If you load a module in the current directory, and the current directory isn't in sys.path, you'll get an absolute path.

If you load a module in the current directory, and the current directory is in sys.path, you'll get a relative path.

The solution was to add abspath like this:

os.path.join(os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__)), 'favicon.ico')

The culprit was some maintenance performed a few weeks ago on the Windows environment which had changed the PATH.

Error 500 while serving favicon with CherryPy

2 Answers2