Relative path to image does not render in restview

[alliefitter]

Given a project with the structure:

foo/
  README.rst
img/
  bar.png

README.rst

.. image:: ../img/b.png

When README.rst is rendered in the browser, the image does not appear. Below are the logs:

127.0.0.1 - - [19/Jan/2018 19:23:24] code 404, message File not found: /img/bar.png
127.0.0.1 - - [19/Jan/2018 19:23:24] "GET /img/bar.png HTTP/1.1" 404 -

It looks like it's striping the ... When uploaded to GutHub, the images are rendered correctly.
restview version: 2.8.0
python version: 3.6

[mgedmin]

If you have a project structured like this, and you run restview . at the top, you'll get a list of all .rst (and .txt) files. If you then click on foo/README.rst, the image will be visible.

If, on the other hand, you run restview README.rst inside the foo/ subdirectory, or restview foo/README.rst at the project root, the image will not be available. This is because the URL structure doesn't work. When README.rst is exposed at /, and you have a relative link starting with .., it has no upper level to climb to. As you can see in your pasted access log, the browser requests /img/bar.png and not /../img/bar.png, so restview is trying to find a img/bar.png in the directory that contains the README.rst. In fact if you create a symlink ln -s ../img bar/img, the images will start working.

Perhaps it would be nice if you could tell restview to serve everything under ., but ask it to open foo/README.rst instead of the list of files. Something like restview . --open foo/README.rst or restview foo/README.rst --root . maybe? I'm willing to accept such a pull request, but I don't know if I will find the time to work on it myself.

[alliefitter]

Thanks for the response. That makes sense. My issue was not thinking of restview as a web server.

[mgedmin]

Actually, perhaps I should stop thinking of restview as a web server and start thinking about it as a program that displays ReStructuredText documents. There's nothing preventing me from discovering all the image directives in the document, making a list of images, and rewriting them into URLs that work (plus making sure to expose them via HTTP).

Well, nothing except for lack of time...