The Development Environment

You develop and upload applications for Google App Engine using the App Engine software development kit (SDK).

The SDK includes a web server application that simulates the App Engine environment, including a local version of the datastore, Google Accounts, and the ability to fetch URLs and send email directly from your computer using the App Engine APIs. The SDK runs on any computer with Python 2.5, and versions are available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

If necessary, download and install Python 2.5 for your platform from the Python website. Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard users already have Python 2.5 installed.

Download the App Engine SDK. Follow the instructions on the download page to install the SDK on your computer.

For this tutorial, you will use two commands from the SDK:

• dev_appserver.py, the development web server
• appcfg.py, for uploading your app to App Engine

For Windows users: the Windows installer puts these commands in the command path. After installation, you can run these commands from a command prompt.

For Mac users: Google App Engine Launcher includes these commands with the application. You can put these commands in the command path by selecting "Make Symlinks..." from the "GoogleAppEngineLauncher" menu. Alternatively, you can use the Launcher to run the development web server and deploy your application instead of running the commands.

If you are using the Zip archive version of the SDK, you will find these commands in the google_appengine directory.

Next...

The local development environment lets you develop and test complete App Engine applications before showing them to the world. Let's write some code.

Continue to Hello, World!