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Run and Debug Config for PyDev w/ Google Apps Engine

May 1st, 2008 Posted in Google App Engine, OS X, PyDev

Google App Engine LogoNow that I have PyDev running in my Eclipse the next big step was to get support for running and debugging the Google App Engine SDK. This will be a simple post since Josh Feth Suttgart already took care of figuring out, by far, the simplest and most robust way of building your run configuration in Eclipse. Follow his step by step instructions here:

Google App Engine & eclipse (PyDev)

Once you have configured your run environment his setup also allows for you to debug from the same launch profile. To debug you just use the Debug version of the launch profile, no changes have to be made! There are a few things to note about this configuration:

  • When you start a run session this only starts the Google App Engine server. Unlike using Flex Builder or Aptana, this does not launch a browser window to your application path. You will need to open a browser window and then navigate to the localhost:[port] that you have configured. If someone knows how to directly launch to a specified path let me know and I will update this post.
  • Since you are starting a server with your run session you need to stop the session before starting a new debug session (or visa versa). If you do not stop (terminate) the previous session you will get an error in the Eclipse console.
  • The Google App Engine is smart enough to check touch times so when you update a file you can just refresh the browser (’course you probably know that if you did the gApp tutorial). This makes the workflow with PyDev really easy. Keep you browser window open and keep hitting refresh after any changes. Unless of course you are using a lot of JavaScript then you may need to clear you cache.

Have fun and let me know if you have any tips on improving the workflow!

  1. 6 Responses to “Run and Debug Config for PyDev w/ Google Apps Engine”

  2. By Jim Fritchman on Jul 2, 2008

    Josh Feth Suttgart’s post is all about using Windows. Can you please help me with how you changed that for OS X?

    Any help would be appreciated.

    Thanks,
    Jim Fritchman

  3. By James on Jul 2, 2008

    Jim,
    Which steps in is post are throwing you? If it is the aspect of getting PyDev to recognize your Python in OS X, check out my post here:

    http://blog.vivisectingmedia.com/2008/04/instal...

    My post above is pretty much about step 5, setting up your Python Interpreter. If there are other steps that are causing confusion, let me know. Most of the Windows Eclipse steps translate to OS X, more or less.

  4. By Jim Fritchman on Jul 3, 2008

    The steps that are getting me are where exactly did Google install to, it says /usr/local/bin and I did find them there and I added them just like the post says but I get an ImportError: No module named google.appengine.ext.

  5. By James on Jul 3, 2008

    Ah, okay. The engine PY files are there to allow you to run the server command from anywhere but the source for me is located at /usr/local/googleappengine/

    I can’t recall if that was the default for the install, but I think it is. That is where I pointed my Eclipse to and it worked for me. Let me know if your path is the same or not. If not, do a search for dev    appserver.py since this file is also located with the source.

  6. By Jim Fritchman on Jul 3, 2008

    I got it working …

    Thank you very much for your help

    Jim

  7. By James on Jul 3, 2008

    Awesome! I am glad I could help!

    James

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