Design Advice

[Joshua Smith]

I have a big app running on AppEngine standard, python 2.7.

It’s tracking analytics info from dozens of apps in the field, and I’m thinking about adding a “real time” feature, similar to what google analytics has. A web client would show inbound hits on a map as they occur, for example.

While the incoming data has some scale (not massive, typically about 4 instances), there will never be a lot of people viewing the output. 2 or 3 at a time, at most. Usually 0.

I’m wondering whether folks in this group have advice on the best approach to send a real-time data flow into the web pages.

- WebSockets seems logical, but it looks like GAE standard doesn’t support them

- I could run a websockets server somewhere else (EC2?) and somehow (?) send messages from GAE to that for distribution

- I looked at gcloud PubSub, but that seems to be more of a server->server tool than a way to send messages to web apps

- I looked at gcloud message, but that seems ill suited to use in web pages

- Polling sounds expensive, since I’d need to create lots and lots of temporary database items for the messages

Is there some other tool or technique out there that I should investigate?

-Joshua

[Olu]

I think using Firebase Realtime Database to send real-time updates might be applicable in your setup and it works well with App Engine(Standard). I suggest you go through this doc[1].

[1]https://cloud.google.com/solutions/using-firebase-real-time-events-app-engine

[Joshua Smith]

This looks very promising, and I’m playing with it now. Getting the permissions set up is hard, though.

At first, I simply tried to create a firebase project associated with the GAE project that’s going to dump data there. I was able to do that, but it won’t let me create a realtime database because my GAE project has a database of its own.

So then I tried creating a brand new thing. And that works, except I can’t figure out how to give my GAE project permission to read/write to it. If I try to add it’s “@appspot.gserviceaccount.com” email as a User with Editor permission, it just gives an error.

Any idea how I can give my GAE project permission to authenticate against a different Firebase project?

-Joshua

On Jan 10, 2020, at 9:51 AM, 'Olu' via Google App Engine <google-a...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

I think using Firebase Realtime Database to send real-time updates might be applicable in your setup and it works well with App Engine(Standard). I suggest you go through this doc[1].

[1]https://cloud.google.com/solutions/using-firebase-real-time-events-app-engine

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[Joshua Smith]

And a related issue. I have some code that this app successfully uses to connect to the google analytics API. I tweaked that code for firebase as follows:

  from oauth2client.service_account import ServiceAccountCredentials

  from httplib2 import Http

  credentials = ServiceAccountCredentials.from_json_keyfile_name(

      CLIENT_SECRETS, scopes=['https://www.googleapis.com/auth/firebase.database', 'https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.email'])

  http = Http()

  http_auth = credentials.authorize(http)

But that gives 401 errors. I would guess that I need to enabled an API on the console, but I can’t figure out which one to enable. I enabled “Firebase Storage” but that didn’t help.

What API do I need to enable to get that scope authorized?

-Joshua

[Niall McCarthy]

A quick bit of guidance needed I am new to App Engine and evaluating it for a large new development. The development would have approximately

400 to 500 users initially. The main question I need to ask is the design would require a separate app engine instance and cloudsql db per user.

Does app engine support this setup should be looking Cloud Run for this any starting advice appreciated.

[Pierre-Yves Blain]

Is the Analytics API enabled? Also, was the service account email address used to add a user to the analytics account you want to access via the API?

You can follow this detailed quickstart documentation [1] with explicit steps to accomplish the authorization.

[1] https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/config/mgmt/v3/quickstart/service-py

On Friday, January 10, 2020 at 4:09:23 PM UTC-5, Joshua Smith wrote:

And a related issue. I have some code that this app successfully uses to connect to the google analytics API. I tweaked that code for firebase as follows:

  from oauth2client.service_account import ServiceAccountCredentials

  from httplib2 import Http

  credentials = ServiceAccountCredentials.from_json_keyfile_name(

      CLIENT_SECRETS, scopes=['https://www.googleapis.com/auth/firebase.database', 'https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.email'])

  http = Http()

  http_auth = credentials.authorize(http)

But that gives 401 errors. I would guess that I need to enabled an API on the console, but I can’t figure out which one to enable. I enabled “Firebase Storage” but that didn’t help.

What API do I need to enable to get that scope authorized?

-Joshua

On Jan 10, 2020, at 3:19 PM, Joshua Smith <mrjoshu...@gmail.com> wrote:

This looks very promising, and I’m playing with it now. Getting the permissions set up is hard, though.

At first, I simply tried to create a firebase project associated with the GAE project that’s going to dump data there. I was able to do that, but it won’t let me create a realtime database because my GAE project has a database of its own.

So then I tried creating a brand new thing. And that works, except I can’t figure out how to give my GAE project permission to read/write to it. If I try to add it’s “@appspot.gserviceaccount.com” email as a User with Editor permission, it just gives an error.

Any idea how I can give my GAE project permission to authenticate against a different Firebase project?

-Joshua

On Jan 10, 2020, at 9:51 AM, 'Olu' via Google App Engine <google-appengine@googlegroups.com> wrote:

I think using Firebase Realtime Database to send real-time updates might be applicable in your setup and it works well with App Engine(Standard). I suggest you go through this doc[1].

[1]https://cloud.google.com/solutions/using-firebase-real-time-events-app-engine

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[Joshua Smith]

This isn’t accessing analytics, it’s accessing Firebase. I just had some working code from Analytics that I used as a starting point.

Anyway, I figured it out. The trick is that I needed to create a new service account private key over on the Firebase side, download client secrets from there, and then use those secrets in the authenticated calls to firebase.

-Joshua

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