Installing the Google App Engine SDK and Django 1.0.2
by Peter.
This was quite tricky for me, so I’m writing this down to share it with others.
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Install the SDK
Simply download the SDK and install it. On Mac OS X that meant that I mounted the disk image, dragged the SDK app to my applications directory, and launched it. Make sure to give the app the necessary permission to create symlinks.
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Get the latest version of google-app-engine-django
Use SVN to export the latest version of google-app-engine-django:
svn export http://google-app-engine-django.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ your-app-dir
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Get the latest stable version of Django
Download from http://www.djangoproject.com/download/. Decompress it.
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Zip up Django
Google Apps currently uses version 0.96 of Django and they do not plan to switch in the near future. Thus, you need to put a
django.zip
file in your App Engine app directory,your-app-dir
. You create the file by, from the Terminal, going to the directory of the new version of Django you downloaded and typing:zip -r django.zip django/__init__.py django/bin django/core django/db django/dispatch django/forms django/http django/middleware django/shortcuts django/template django/templatetags django/test django/utils django/views
zip -r django.zip django/conf -x 'django/conf/locale/*'
zip -r django.zip django/contrib/__init__.py django/contrib/formtools django/contrib/auth django/contrib/sessions
Note there is an oversight in the App Engine article about zipping Django 1.0; the last two directories are necessary.
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Edit settings
Open
app.yaml
in your App Engine app directory and change the application name on line 1 to the name of your application. Then, opensettings.py
and uncomment line 83 so thatdjango.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware
is included. -
Launch the default app
From your App Engine app directory, launch the server:
python manage.py runserver
. If everything went correctly you should see the server mention using zipimporter and then announce that your app is running at http://localhost:8000. Open the URL and your should see a simple welcome message. -
Build your app!
Now you can get started building a Django app on App Engine. Make sure to read the article on using the Django App Engine helper to see how to start building your app.