boilderplate / skeleton for creating an api on appengine with flask and ndb.

i've compiled this from a few projects i've worked on using google's appengine.

use pip (http://pip-installer.org) to manage python 3rd party dependencies. virtualenv (http://virtualenv.org) creates isolated python environments so you can work on more than one python project without pip installed library packages overlapping and conflicting. virtualenvwrapper (http://virtualenvwrapper.readthedocs.org) is a layer that sits on top of virtualenv to provide some command line sugar, and ease of virtualenv management.

install pip

sudo easy_install pip

install virtualenv

sudo pip install virtualenv virtualenvwrapper

install google appengine sdk (DON'T FUCKING USE THE INSTALLER)

curl -O http://googleappengine.googlecode.com/files/google_appengine_1.7.4.zip
unzip -d ~/ -oq google_appengine_1.7.4.zip

update ~/.bash_profile

# path setup
export PATH="~/google_appengine:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin:${PATH}"

# virtualenvwrapper for python
export WORKON_HOME=~/.virtualenvs
. /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh

setup virtualenvwrapper so virtual environments can be found in the home directory in the folder .virtualenvs. this, i've discovered, has turned out to be a solid pattern to use to organize multiple python projects per machine.

use virtualenvwrapper to create a new virtualenv environment flask-ndb-api.

mkvirtualenv --no-site-packages flask-ndb-api

now, to activate the specific python environment, run the command:

workon flask-ndb-api

cd  ~/.virtualenvs/flask-ndb-api
echo "~/google_appengine" >> lib/python2.7/site-packages/gae.pth
echo "import dev_appserver; dev_appserver.fix_sys_path()" >> lib/python2.7/site-packages/gae.pth

this adds google appengine sdk's scripts to shell's executable path, so we can invoke it's commands.