No Cloud Tasks local emulator

[Ryan B]

I have a bunch of small apps on App Engine Standard, on the old generation Python 2 runtime. I'm itching to migrate to Python 3 Standard, but I use many of the classic App Engine APIs - datastore via ndb, task queues, memcache, etc - which are difficult to migrate away from.

Tasks is one of the biggest current blockers. I'd happily switch to Cloud Tasks, but it has no local emulator, which makes local development and unit testing difficult at best. I've starred the issue. Any news on if/when we can expect an emulator? (I'd ask on the Cloud tasks mailing list, but it requires approval to join.)

More broadly, the writing is on the wall. App Engine's future is serverless, containerized, and decoupled from services like datastore, task management, in-memory caches, etc. Flexible got there first, Standard's new generation of runtimes (Python 3 etc) followed.

Other forum members have already written eloquently about this here (see GAE APIs, The end of PaaS?), so I won't recap their concerns. Personally, I'm ok with this decoupling roadmap. I even trust that you all will gradually fill in our migration path. And I know Python 2 isn't going EOL anytime soon. I'm just impatient to get onto Python 3, so I'm chafing at blockers like Cloud Tasks' lack of an emulator.

[George (Cloud Platform Support)]

Hello Ryan, 

Your interest in this feature has been properly taken into consideration, and your suggestions highly appreciated. At the moment, this feature is still work in progress. I hope this is going to get implemented soon. There are no proper estimates for a final implementation date. You can follow developments in the thread you have starred. Engineering should update thread in real time. 

[Aert van de Hulsbeek]

Hi Ryan,

See if the emulator I built works for you: https://github.com/aertje/cloud-tasks-emulator. It's pretty bare bones but hopefully it helps.

Thanks for replying to my question re. the NDB migration btw!

[Ryan B]

On Friday, January 17, 2020 at 7:04:24 AM UTC-8, Aert van de Hulsbeek wrote:

See if the emulator I built works for you: https://github.com/aertje/cloud-tasks-emulator. It's pretty bare bones but hopefully it helps.

Thanks for replying to my question re. the NDB migration btw!

oh wow, that's exciting! thanks for the nudge, and the kind words. i'll give it a shot.

[Joshua Fox]

I built an in-process emulator for Python development.

There are also  emulators that run in a separate process in localhost: Potato London’s gcloud-tasks-emulator and Aert van de Hulsbeek’s cloud-tasks-emulator, mentioned earlier.