Deploying To App Engine

It's a good idea to deploy your code to the actual AppEngine servers to test. Most features work the same between the local development environment and the servers, but now and then you'll run into something that doesn't.

Deploying is fairly simple, although it does require that you finally pick your application name on appspot.com, if you haven't already.

Step 1

Create your application. Go to the Google AppEngine site and log into your account. Click "Create an Application".

Type in the Application Identifier. This doubles as part of the URL for accessing your application at appspot.com, so it has to be unique and will be publicly visible.
Also enter the Application Title, and click Save.

Step 2

Back in Eclipse, we need to hook your project up to the application you just created. Right click on the project and go into Properties. Expand the Google section and click on App Engine. Under Application ID, type in the identifier you entered when you created your application.

Close out of the Preferences.

Step 3

Deploy! Right click on the project, go down to the Google menu and choose Deploy to App Engine. Enter the email address and password you used when you signed up for Google AppEngine, and click Deploy.

It should happen automatically, now you can open a web browser and go to your application id .appspot.com to see your application live on Google's servers.

Step 4

Everything blows up!

Well, maybe not. But if you're using RPXNow for authentication, you won't be able to get logged in unless you followed my advice back in the post on validating user emails. The reason is that part of the HTML in your sign in link is the location of your RPX results servlet. Right now, that probably still is what you had when you were developing it...e.g. http://localhost:8080/rpxresults.

Your application needs to change the http://localhost:8080 part based on whether it's running in development mode or in production mode. With a recent version of AppEngine, you'd use something like this:


if (SystemProperty.environment.get().contains("Development"))
  hostName = "localhost:8080";
else
  hostName = "gamesbyteens.appspot.com";


at an appropriate point where you fetch the host name for inclusion into the data model for your pages.