Python virtualenv for Google App Engine and Flask

Ok, this was so easy I couldn't believe it. First Download the App Engine SDK. Then install virtualenv if you don't already have. Create a new folder, for example, /opt/environments/gae and do some virtualenv magic:

$ cd /opt/environments
$ mkdir my-gae
$ virtualenv my-gae

New python executable in my-gae/bin/python
Installing distribute....done.
Installing pip....done.

Great, now I installed the SDK inside the virtualenv folder:

$ cd my-gae
$ unzip ~/Downloads/google_appengine_1.7.7.zip
$ mv google_appengine google_appengine_1.7.7
$ ln -s google_appengine_1.7.7 gae

You should be left with something like this:


├── bin
├── gae -> google_appengine-1.7.7
├── google_appengine-1.7.7
├── include
├── lib
└── local

This will allow us to update our GAE SDK version without much hassle. Now let's configure the SDK for our new virtualenv. First, edit the file "bin/activate" to look like this:

PATH="$VIRTUAL_ENV/bin:$PATH"

PATH="$VIRTUAL_ENV/gae:$PATH"   # New line for GAE

export PATH

Next time you run "source bin/activate" that line will add the SDK dev_appserver.py executable to our path.

Finally, we need to add our path configuration for the GAE path. Create a new file lib/python2.7/site-packages/gae.pth with the following:

$ cat lib/python2.7/site-packages/gae.pth

/opt/environments/my-gae/gae

import dev_appserver; dev_appserver.fix_sys_path()

Let's see if everything works.

$ cd /opt/environments/my-gae

$ source bin/activate

(my-gae)

$ dev_appserver.py

usage: dev_appserver.py [-h] [--host HOST] [--port PORT]

                        [--admin_host ADMIN_HOST] [--admin_port ADMIN_PORT]

...

dev_appserver.py: error: too few arguments

(my-gae)

$ python -c "from google import appengine"

(my-gae)

We're done with the GAE SDK, now let's go with Flask, which is a bit of a pain, specially Flask-Babel. The easiest thing to do is to use one of the already set up projects like flask-appengine-template or http://gae-init.appspot.com/ which include everything you need.