How are people using Google App-Engine apps with their own domains?

Question

I've been fooling around with the Google App Engine for a few days and I have a little hobby application that I want to write and deploy.

However I'd like to set it up so that users are not directly accessing the app via appspot.com.

Is hosting it through Google Apps and then pointing it at my own domain the only way to go? I looked at that a little bit and it seemed like a pain to implement but maybe I'm just missing something.

My other thought was to write the app-engine piece as a more generic web-service.

Then I could have the user-facing piece be hosted anywhere, written in any language, and have it query the appspot.com url.

Anyone have any luck with the web-service approach?

Answer 1

To do this, I believe you need to be using Google Apps and have a custom domain setup for Google Apps. Then, you deploy your app into your Google Apps domain.

Answer 2

Can you clarify why it is you don't want to use Google Apps? It doesn't cost anything, and as others have pointed out, you don't have to use any of the services. If you already have a google apps domain, you can just add this one as an alias and map it to the App Engine app, too.

Answer 3

The reason Google Apps is required is because you need somewhere to a) verify you own the domain (otherwise, you might point it at app engine, then I might hijack it by adding it to my account) and b) set up domain mappings (which subdomains point to which of your appengine apps).

Since this stuff already exists in Apps, it seems silly to duplicate it in AppEngine.

As has been pointed out, it doesn't cost anything, and you do not need to "move" anything to Google. You simple created a cname record with a random name to verify you own the domain, and a cname for the subdomain you wish to point at App Engine. This only takes a few minutes, and once it's done, it's done forever.

Note: If you host your site elsewhere and use webservices, you need to scale the site/frontend. If you host on app engine, you get this for free :-)

I wrote an article on my blog about redirecting *.appspot.com domains to your custom domain to keep your branding:

http://blog.dantup.com/2009/12/redirecting-requests-from-appid-appspot-com-to-a-custom-domain

Answer 4

Here is google's official instructions on how to do that:

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/domain.html

I have used this process for a couple of sites and it is easy and painless, provided you have control on the DNS records for your domain (you should).