h1. This library is no longer supported and probably should not be used. To be honest, we had to move off AppEngine after Google “jacked up the price.”:http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/platform/google-app-engine-price-hike-stuns-devel/231600672

      _                                _              _____                     _       _       
     /_\  _ __  _ __   ___ _ __   __ _(_)_ __   ___  /__   \___ _ __ ___  _ __ | | __ _| |_ ___ 
    //_\\| '_ \| '_ \ / _ \ '_ \ / _` | | '_ \ / _ \   / /\/ _ \ '_ ` _ \| '_ \| |/ _` | __/ _ \
   /  _  \ |_) | |_) |  __/ | | | (_| | | | | |  __/  / / |  __/ | | | | | |_) | | (_| | ||  __/
   \_/ \_/ .__/| .__/ \___|_| |_|\__, |_|_| |_|\___|  \/   \___|_| |_| |_| .__/|_|\__,_|\__\___|
         |_|   |_|               |___/                                   |_|                    

Bootstrap a Google App Engine project with Django and other goodies.

Used by Los Angeles Times websites like “crime.latimes.com”:http://crime.latimes.com/, “documents.latimes.com”:http://documents.latimes.com/, “laccd.latimes.com”:http://laccd.latimes.com and “spreadsheets.latimes.com”:http://spreadsheets.latimes.com.

Beware. This software is in beta testing and hasn’t been used much. But don’t let that stop you! Please try it and tell me what sucks.

h2. Features

• Creates a ready-to-roll “App Engine”:http://code.google.com/appengine/ project with a single command.
• Includes “Google App Engine Helper for Django”:http://code.google.com/p/google-app-engine-django/
• Includes “pytz tuned for google app engine”:http://code.google.com/p/gae-pytz/
• Includes a modified version of “appengine-search”:https://github.com/DocSavage/appengine-search for full-text search
• Includes a toolbox of utilities commonly used “@latimes”:http://www.latimes.com, like BeautifulSoup, Universal Feed Parser and some cache control tricks.

h2. Requirements

• python2.5. “In Ubuntu 10.10, where I work, App Engine seems to only work with python2.5”:http://www.codigomanso.com/en/2010/05/google-app-engine-en-ubuntu-10-4-lucid-lynx/
• “virtualenv”:http://pypi.python.org/pypi/virtualenv
• “pip”:http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pip/0.8.2

h2. Installation

h3. 01. Create a virtualenv to operate in

I’m going to call this test project ‘hello-appengine’

$ virtualenv --no-site-packages hello-appengine
$ cd hello-appengine
$ . bin/activate

h3. 02. Install the app

$ pip install latimes-appengine-template

h3. 03. Create your project

From the shell, enter:

$ startappengineproject hello-appengine

h3. 04. Fire up the Django runserver

$ cd project
$ python2.5 manage.py runserver

The check it out at “http://localhost:8000”:http://localhost:8000. You should see “this”:http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-django/fig01.jpg.

h2. If that fails…

I’m trying to get this thing to work via pip, but if that fails you can instead:

Download this repo.

Copy the appengine_template to wherever you want your project folder to be

Rename the google_appengine subdirectory to .google_appengine

Put your app_id into the app.yaml file

And that’ll pretty much do it.