Getting started with google-app-engine

Remarks#

There are two ways to get the GAE SDK (the standalone GAE SDK vs Google Cloud SDK gcloud). There are slight differences when the deploying the app using gcloud. If you are using gcloud, you can use gcloud app deploy ~/my_app/app.yaml. The behaviour is different from using the old appcfg.py. If you prefer using appcfg.py, you will find that it is not available. It is because for some reasons, Google decided to hide it from the developer. However, the appcfg.py is, in fact, installed in the directory google-cloud-sdk/platform/google_appengine/. Other useful scripts such as bulkloader.py are there as well.

Versions#

Version	Released Date
1.9.40	2016-07-15

Setup

Google AppEngine (GAE) is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that provides the ability to deploy applications at “Google Scale”. It is one of the many services on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Developers can integrate other services such as Google Cloud Storage (GCS) and Google Cloud SQL on GCP easily. Developers can write a set of code that runs locally and can easily be deployed on Google Cloud Platform.

A birds eye view of getting started with AppEngine includes the following:

Install the SDK for your preferred language (Go, Python, Java, PHP, Node.js(in Beta))
Use the SDK to scaffold an application & develop locally
Deploy the same code that runs locally, to a scalable runtime environment

The AppEngine SDK can also be installed using the Google Cloud SDK:

Install the Google Cloud SDK
Initialize the Google Cloud SDK
Authorize the Google Cloud SDK
Install the GAE components. For python user,
```
gcloud components install app-engine-python app-engine-python-extras
```
and for go user,
```
gcloud components install app-engine-go
```
For other languages, use gcloud components list to get the list of installed and available components.
After awhile, the GAE SDK will be installed.