installing SDK on Ubuntu Linux

[theaellen]

These are the steps I took to get the App Engine running on my Linux
system. I'm putting this up here for anyone that is new to this type
of set-up, it is a little different from commercial applications since
you don't run a "set-up" file. This is just to get started.

Download the Google App Engine SDK to your desktop. It will be a file
called google_appengine_1.0.1.zip

Double click to open the zip, select google_appengine, then extract.
It will create a folder called google_appengine. Go ahead and put it
on your desktop or wherever you prefer. This folder, google_appengine
will be the root or main location of your operations. It does not need
to be in the system root or bin files--in fact, you would not want to
put it in the root. It could be anywhere but you need to know where to
find it. On the desktop, the path would be

~/Desktop/google_appengine/

which is the same as:

thea/Desktop/google_appengine/
(where thea is my username)
=============

That is all you have to do, Google App Engine is installed. It is not
neccessary to run any setup programs. But do make sure Python 2.5 is
already installed by using System/Administration/Synaptic package
manager, click on Search and enter Python 2.5. The checkbox for
Python 2.5 should be green meaning it is installed and ready to go.
(Another way to check is to use the terminal window and type "which
python2.5" and it should respond with "/usr/bin/python2.5" which
means it is installed on your system).

Now to try out the Helloworld example in the tutorial

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/gettingstarted/helloworld.html

Create a new folder inside the google_appengine folder and call it
helloworld. Create the two files (as described in the tutorial)
app.yaml. and helloworld.py and put them in the folder.

==========

This program needs the special web server to be running. Once you
publish your application, it will use the google web servers, but for
now, they gave you a small, complimentary web-server to run on your
machine. To start it up, since it isnt' running yet, you have to run
the program dev_appserver.py which requires opening a terminal window
( Applications menu/Accessories/Terminal ).

To start up the server, open a terminal window and type in

~/Desktop/google_appengine/dev_appserver.py ~/Desktop/
google_appengine/helloworld

It seems like a long command, but that is only because of the path
names. All it really does is executes the program dev_appserver.py
and passes it the parameter helloworld. The .py is an extension that
means the file is a python program. The program executs and starts a
little server that will run until you stop it (control -C, or by just
closing the terminal window). So don't close the terminal window or
things won't work until you restart the program again (see above
command)!!

results on the screen:
INFO 2008-05-08 20:41:48,793 __init__.py] Checking for updates to
the SDK.
INFO 2008-05-08 20:41:48,908 __init__.py] The SDK is up to date.
WARNING 2008-05-08 20:41:48,908 __init__.py] Could not read datastore
data from /tmp/dev_appserver.datastore
WARNING 2008-05-08 20:41:48,908 __init__.py] Could not read datastore
data from /tmp/dev_appserver.datastore.history
INFO 2008-05-08 20:41:48,982 __init__.py] Running application
helloworld on port 8080: http://localhost:8080
INFO 2008-05-09 00:42:51,197 __init__.py] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 -
INFO 2008-05-09 00:42:51,246 __init__.py] Updating /home/thea/
Desktop/google_appengine/helloworld/index.yaml
INFO 2008-05-09 00:42:51,501 __init__.py] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/
1.1" 200 -
INFO 2008-05-09 00:52:07,398 __init__.py] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 -

========================
It may not look too good, but actually it is running. Following
instructions, point a browser to:

http://localhost:8080/

results on screen:

Hello, world!


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Success. you're on your way to bigger and better things.