How do you host your website on Google App Engine?
Google App Engine is a powerful platform that lets you build and run applications on Google's infrastructure — whether you need to build a multi-tiered web application from scratch or host a static website. Here's a step-by-step guide to hosting your website on Google App Engine.
Creating a Google Cloud Platform project
To use Google's tools for your own site or app, you need to create a new project on Google Cloud Platform. This requires having a Google account.
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Go to the App Engine dashboard on the Google Cloud Platform Console and press the Create button.
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If you've not created a project before, you'll need to select whether you want to receive email updates or not, agree to the Terms of Service, and then you should be able to continue.
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Enter a name for the project, edit your project ID and note it down. For this tutorial, the following values are used:
- Project Name: GAE Sample Site
- Project ID: gaesamplesite
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Click the Create button to create your project.
Creating an application
Each Cloud Platform project can contain one App Engine application. Let's prepare an app for our project.
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We'll need a sample application to publish. If you've not got one to use, download and unzip this sample app.
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Have a look at the sample application's structure — the
website
folder contains your website content andapp.yaml
is your application configuration file.- Your website content must go inside the
website
folder, and its landing page must be calledindex.html
, but apart from that it can take whatever form you like. - The
app.yaml
file is a configuration file that tells App Engine how to map URLs to your static files. You don't need to edit it.
- Your website content must go inside the
Publishing your application
Now that we've got our project made and sample app files collected together, let's publish our app.
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Open Google Cloud Shell.
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Drag and drop the
sample-app
folder into the left pane of the code editor. -
Run the following in the command line to select your project:
bashgcloud config set project gaesamplesite
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Then run the following command to go to your app's directory:
bashcd sample-app
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You are now ready to deploy your application, i.e. upload your app to App Engine:
bashgcloud app deploy
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Enter a number to choose the region where you want your application located.
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Enter
Y
to confirm. -
Now navigate your browser to your-project-id.appspot.com to see your website online. For example, for the project ID gaesamplesite, go to gaesamplesite.appspot.com.
See also
To learn more, see Google App Engine Documentation.