This sets up a VirtualBox VM for developing a Google App Engine project, including the App Engine SDK and a trivial app with initial tests.
Having a starting point within reach scratches an itch I have. It may require some fiddling to scratch yours. Fiddle away. I recommend working through at least one app engine app (e.g., the example app) before trying this.
Building the VM requires VirtualBox and Vagrant. If you're running Ubuntu,
sudo apt-get install virtualbox
gets you the former, and following the instructions on http://vagrant.io gets you the latter. If you're on some other platform, follow whatever instructions you need to to get VirtualBox and Vagrant set up.
Pull this project down from github, then
vagrant up
On my Linux laptop, with an SSD and over a mediocre network connection, it takes about 7 minutes to build the VM.
The commands below are issued from a shell session into the VM. vagrant ssh gets you into the VM; cd /vagrant gets you to the directory within the VM that's shared with the current (at the time of VM startup) directory outside of the VM.
I exit the ssh session and use vagrant suspend to shut things down cleanly, then vagrant restart to restart the VM.
make dev will kick off dev_appserver. In the host OS, the application will be available on http://localhost:8080/, and the admin server will be available on http://localhost:8000/.
Reload-on-change isn't working inside the VirtualBox guest OS, so you'll need to restart dev_appserver to see code changes. (There's a trail of bug reports about this on the internets. If you find a solution that's amenable to pull requests, please send it my way!)
make test runs tests.
Note that the example tests use Webtest, which bypasses app.yaml. In particular, this means that these tests won't cover any login: behavior specified in app.yaml.
See the Webtest Doc for more on Webtest.
Use gcloud init to do the initial log in, and to specify a project name you'll be deploying to. If you need to login again, use gcloud auth login.
make deploy deploys the app.
By default, each deploy of the app gets a new version. To control the version, add --version to the gcloud command in Makefile.
No license. This is unwarrantied, use-at-your-own-riskware. It's mostly pieced together from App Engine documentation and public sources, plus a tiny bit of my own code that you're welcome to.