I have created a simple GAE app based on the default template. I want to add an external module like short_url. How do I do this? The directions that I have found so far are confusing and GAE doesn't seem to use PYTHONPATH for obvious reasons I guess.
Since that url_shortener program written in python, you could just include in your source code and import it like other python modules.
Simply place the short_url.py
file in your app's directory.
Sample App Engine project:
myapp/ app.yaml index.yaml main.py short_url.py views.py
And in views.py
(or wherever), you can then import like so:
import short_url
For more complex projects, perhaps a better method is to create a directory especially for dependencies; say lib
:
myapp/ lib/ __init__.py short_url.py app.yaml index.yaml main.py views.py
from lib import short_url
Edit #2:
Apologies, I should have mentioned this earlier. You need modify your path, thanks to Nick Johnson for the following fix.
Ensure that this code is run before starting up your app; something like this:
import os
import sys
def fix_path():
# credit: Nick Johnson of Google
sys.path.append(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'lib'))
def main():
url_map = [ ('/', views.IndexHandler),] # etc.
app = webapp.WSGIApplication(url_map, debug=False)
wsgiref.handlers.CGIHandler().run(app)
if __name__ == "__main__":
fix_path()
main()
Edit3:
To get this code to run before all other imports, you can put the path managing code in a file of its own in your app's base directory (Python recognizes everything in that directory without any path modifications).
And then you'd just ensure that this import
import fix_path
...is listed before all other imports in your main.py
file.
Here's a link to full, working example in case my explanation wasn't clear.
i will second the answers given by @Adam Bernier and @S.Mark, although adam's explains things is a bit more detail. in general, you can add any pure Python module/package to your App Engine directory and use as-is, as long as they don't try to work outside of the sandbox, i.e, cannot create files, cannot open network sockets, etc.
also keep in mind the hard limits:
- maximum total number of files (app files and static files): 3,000
- maximum size of an application file: 10 megabytes
- maximum size of a static file: 10 megabytes
- maximum total size of all application and static files: 150 megabytes