At Lovely Systems we use zc.buildout to configure our appengine projects. With this post we'd like to introduce one method where buildout could be used for an appengine application that depends on 3rd party modules. In this example the tornado modules are used for views and zope.testing and webtest for testing.

The example application is part of the lovely-gae package. The source can be browsed here and the running application is available at http://lovely-gae.appspot.com/ (there is not much to see).

To run the app you just have to export/checkout the example app directory.

svn export https://lovely-gae.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/example

Then replace the application id with your application id in

app/app.yaml

Now run the bootstrap script, which downloads setuptools and buildout, and creates the buildout commandline tool in bin/buildout.

python bootstrap.py

Now you have to run the actual buildout.

./bin/buildout

This creates a ./bin/instance executable that starts the development server. Note that the dev_appserver.py script from the appengine SDK has to be on the path in order for this to work.

Now to start the development server run

./bin/instance

and go to http://localhost:8080 with your browser to view the start page.

Take a look at the following files, which are all documented inline:

buildout.cfg
app/app.yaml
app/environment.py
app/main.py
app/tests.py


Tests can be run by using the generated ./bin/test executable. Run it with the --help option to get more information.

Caveats

Currently the egg directory is not cleaned up when a newer version of an egg is available, so the app/packages directory needs to be deleted and the bootstrap buildout process has to be re-run, so that the old packages are not in the python path anymore.