URL path with colon (":") results in 404 not found

[dwinston]

Discussed in #1673

^{Originally posted by dwinston June 3, 2022}
I find that I can't GET or POST to a path containing a colon (":"). An example in FastAPI (which uses Starlette):

from fastapi import FastAPI

app = FastAPI()

@app.get("/items:queue")
def queue_new_item():
    return "An item has been queued for later inclusion."

On uvicorn main:app --reload (FYI Python 3.9.12 and FastAPI 0.78.0 on MacOS), I get a 404 response from GET http://127.0.0.1:8000/items:queue.

I also filed this issue in the fastapi repo (fastapi/fastapi#4984), but I suspect that Starlette's use of colons for path parameter converters (https://www.starlette.io/routing/) may be playing a role here.

Is this a bug? I am trying to follow the official google cloud APIs "custom methods" pattern https://cloud.google.com/apis/design/custom_methods:

For custom methods, they should use the following generic HTTP mapping:
https://service.name/v1/some/resource/name:customVerb

[dwinston]

from starlette.routing import compile_path

compile_path("/queries:run")

outputs

(re.compile(r'^/queries$', re.UNICODE), '/queries:run', {})

This seems wrong!

[dwinston]

I suspect 7c7ec5a broke this. It works in starlette 0.17.1 (I have a deployment using this version; I was wondering why colon-including routes are not working for me locally, where I am using 0.19.1 -- via latest FastAPI: https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/release-notes/), and I see that this commit was included since 0.18.0.

/cc @WhiteApfel @aminalaee @Kludex

[Kludex]

• Closed by Fix regression on route paths with colons #1675

The fix will be available on Starlette 0.20.2.