_                                _              _____                     _       _       
     /_\  _ __  _ __   ___ _ __   __ _(_)_ __   ___  /__   \___ _ __ ___  _ __ | | __ _| |_ ___ 
    //_\\| '_ \| '_ \ / _ \ '_ \ / _` | | '_ \ / _ \   / /\/ _ \ '_ ` _ \| '_ \| |/ _` | __/ _ \
   /  _  \ |_) | |_) |  __/ | | | (_| | | | | |  __/  / / |  __/ | | | | | |_) | | (_| | ||  __/
   \_/ \_/ .__/| .__/ \___|_| |_|\__, |_|_| |_|\___|  \/   \___|_| |_| |_| .__/|_|\__,_|\__\___|
         |_|   |_|               |___/                                   |_|                    

Bootstrap a Google App Engine project with Django and other goodies.

Used by Los Angeles Times websites like crime.latimes.com, documents.latimes.com, laccd.latimes.com and spreadsheets.latimes.com.

Beware. This software is in beta testing and hasn’t been used much. But don’t let that stop you! Please try it and tell me what sucks.

• Creates a ready-to-roll App Engine project with a single command.
• Includes Google App Engine Helper for Django
• Includes pytz tuned for google app engine
• Includes a modified version of appengine-search for full-text search
• Includes a toolbox of utilities commonly used @latimes, like BeautifulSoup and Universal Feed Parser.

• python2.5. In Ubuntu 10.10, where I work, App Engine seems to only work with python2.5
• virtualenv
• pip

I’m going to call this test project ‘hello-appengine’

$ virtualenv --no-site-packages hello-appengine
$ cd hello-appengine
$ . bin/activate

$ pip install latimes-appengine-template

From the shell, enter:

$ startappengineproject hello-appengine

$ cd project
$ python2.5 manage.py runserver

The check it out at http://localhost:8000. You should see this.

I’m trying to get this thing to work via pip, but if that fails you can instead:

1. Download this repo.
2. Copy the appengine_template to wherever you want your project folder to be
3. Rename the google_appengine subdirectory to .google_appengine
4. Put your app_id into the app.yaml file

And that’ll pretty much do it.