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It would be nice if, once new code is tested, I could release changes to either a particular subdomain of my GAE app (such as demo.my-gae-app.com instead of my live environment at my-gae-app.com) or a particular backend instance (if subdomains are prohibited or not the right solution here).

Then, I can demo new code changes to my beta testers, and run performance tests against a real-life GAE environment. I know that the GAE SDK comes with a dev appserver, but it stubs most of the API calls, and doesn't handle scaling at all like a production environment would. And although we will absolutely use it for developers' local sandboxes as well as our QA environment, I just don't feel right release code into prod that hasn't ran against an environment that really mimics production.

How do other GAE developers/teams deal with this? I'm really just looking to have a pre-production environment (like "Demo")...but actually on live GAE app servers. Of course, I need to restrict access to this code so that only myself, my developers, my beta testers and our automated perf tests can access it... (that's the kicker).

IAmYourFaja
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2 Answers2

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You can deploy your code to a non-default application version, either by:

  • changing the version tag value in appengine-web.xml
  • calling appcfg.sh with -V version argument
  • changing the version in the deploy options of Google Eclipse plugin

After doing so, you can access your application by visiting version.appid.appspot.com

Note that different versions can access the same application datastore.

proppy
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  • Thanks @proppy (+1) - quick question: my *understanding* was that backend instances are individual given subdomains so they can be referenced directly. Thus `myapp.appid.appspot.com` might have a backend instance, `cronjobs.myapp.appid.appspot.com` that kicks off cron jobs throughout the day. How would this interfere with `demo.myapp.appid.adppspot.com` if I used the `-V demo` argument like you suggest here? Obviously, I would want my normal production cronjob backend, but I would want a demo cronjob backend as well. Thanks again! – IAmYourFaja Sep 11 '12 at 10:51
  • Backends don't have version, in fact each backends is acting like a separate application version. I would suggest creating a backend named `cronjobs-demo`. – proppy Sep 11 '12 at 13:23
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I registered a new application in Google app engine and deployed the beta version to it by changing project 's settings in eclipse. Then using google's tools (see Google doc) I copied the production datastore's content to the new beta app.

  • datastore in read-only mode while extracting data
  • Entity Keys could be problematic when working with unowned relationships - does anyone have information about this?

This provides me a perfect beta live environment.

Gaël Oberson
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