The project is now purely Google App Engine, which greatly simplifies the development, staging and deployment of the website.
Start the development server using
$ dev_appserver.py app-hackathon/
Then navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8080/ and begin testing the site.
Note: this needs to be run from the directory above the project.
Once you have tested your changes locally, you can push them to the staging
server for a final test (or to share with other develpers) before pushing them
to the production site. To do this, change the application name in app.yaml
from app-hackathon to dev-app-hackathon. Now upload the application to Google
App Engine as usual.
Final deployment should be simple. Ensure that the application name in
app.yaml is app-hackathon, and run
$ appcfg.py update app-hackathon/
Note: this needs to be run from the directory above the project.
- Make sure your HTML is valid and well indented. It is really difficult to figure out what the tag hierarchy is when the HTML is malformed, poorly indented, and written by someone else.
- Try to keep your lines limited to 80 characters. I'm often working from a terminal, and lines reaching into the hundreds of characters in length are very unwieldy.
- Avoid using memcaches. Premature optimization only makes development more difficult. If we see some parts of the site that would benefit from their use, file a bug and I'll take care of it.
- Let me (Dan) know before you make a database change. It's usually simpler to write it myself than it is to fix a bad implementation.
- Make sure your resources are in the right place. HTML templates go in
/templates. Stylesheets, images and scripts go in/static. - Python style guide