Karmic Code Monkey

At the end of Google App Engine, Day 1, we got the environment setup. We verified the environment with a very simple application, Hello World. Before moving forward and building the photo sharing application, I want to make sure that I understand how to deploy an application. Given the simplicity of the application, this should be easy. The documentation says that I should run

appcfg.py update [application directory]

and things should just work. My code looks exactly like this.

HelloWorld.py (note the capitalization of this filename–it’s important) contains:

print ‘Content-Type: text/plain’
print ”
print ‘Hello, world!’

app.yaml

application: sseely-gae
version: 1
runtime: python
api_version: 1

handlers:
– url: /.*
  script: helloworld.py

After running appcfg.py update, I navigated to http://sseely-gae.appspot.com and saw an HTTP Status Code 500 error. Blech! I did find that GAE has a basic set of diagnostic tools. To find them, go to http://appengine.google.com/ and sign in. Once there, click on the application to bring up its dashboard. You can then look at the logs for traces as well as requests. Here, I got to see lots of HTTP 500 (Server) errors. Some were for favicon.ico– I don’t have a favicon file setup so that’s expected. The errors for everything else just isn’t good. After some digging around, I found out that I was encountering the difference between a case-sensitive file system and a case-insensitive file system. Windows is case insensitive, so the application ran on my box. When it was deployed to GAE, it failed. I fixed app.yaml to read:

application: sseely-gae
version: 1
runtime: python
api_version: 1

handlers:
– url: /.*
  script: HelloWorld.py

I uploaded the application back to GAE, and this time, I saw HelloWorld work.

I ran into one other issue that was easily fixed. I saw some errors early on when the Python app started up. After seeing this case sensitivity, I figured that I was running into another Unix like behavior. Unix files typically use a linefeed character (n) after each line. Windows will frequently use a carriage return line feed (rn). I wrote a little application to read in a file and convert any rn combinations to n. This removed the remaining, non-serious errors I saw on Windows in the development environment.