Apps On Google Cloud With App Engine – Starter Guide With Sample

We have discussed about the Software as a Service (SaaS) those can be deployed on Platform as a Service (PaaS), we also have presented you a nice guide on how to create live feed of your Google Plus Posts. We have mentioned in that post, we are using App Engine to to run the app, i.e. our SaaS. In the same way, you can create your own instance of SaaS – your own Apps on Google Cloud can be deployed with App Engine. We are writing this guide in a way that any starter can follow and run own Apps on Google Cloud Platform.

 

Basic need to run apps On Google Cloud App Engine Platform

 

You will need a Google account and Google App Engine account. Both are free. A text editor like gedit for Windows will be helpful. You need to install Python (we will show to how to create and run Python apps on Google Cloud) and Google App Engine SDK for Python. Everything is Open Source and we expect that you will develop and share Open Source apps On Google Cloud as well.

 

Creating and running Apps On Google Cloud App Engine

 

Go to admin Console in your App Engine Account :

Click the “Create Application Button”, give a suitable Application Identifier and Application Title, note these in your text editor. For example, we have used tcw-test for both. Keep other settings at default and click Create Application button, you will get “Application Registered Successfully” message. Forget it. By the way, every Google App Engine application can use up to 500MB persistent storage and 5 million monthly page views.

We are using a sample application named simple ajax chat, which you can download from here.

 

To run this kind of apps on Google Cloud With App Engine follow my steps –

 

• Create or download the sample, like from the example above.
• Create an instance, like we have created “tcw-test”.
• After downloading the sample app, change the name of the folder to you app’s name; tcw-test in our case. Inside this tcw-test folder (which was simpleajaxchat like name originally, there will be files and folders.)
• You will find a file named app.yaml ; open it with gedit. Change the name of Application from simple-ajax-chat to your app’s name (tcw-test in our example). In most cases, other change might be needed, but this is a simple app, needs no further modification.
• Now you need to upload and deploy. You can use the Google App Engine Launcher or use our batch script to run and update Apps On Google Cloud.

 

Sample batch script for running Apps On Google Cloud With App Engine (Windows 7 64 bit, change as needed) :

 

“C:Python25python” “C:Program Files (x86)Googlegoogle_appengineappcfg.py” update C:UsersAbhishekDesktoptcw-test

 

Save it as a batch script, with the same name of the app (tcw-test.bat in our example).Double clicking the batch file will launch cmd and act as shell. You will need to type google id and password.

 

Note : If you have enabled Google two step verification, generate app specific password from here.

 

Done. See our tcw-test here : tcw-test is a prototype for these Apps On Google Cloud With App Engine.

You can change the html, css etc and deploy again by running the batch script or Google App Engine Launcher. Now, you have understood how the apps on Google Cloud powered App Engine can be easily deployed.