How to Download Google App Engine Code
Google App Engine is a web hosting platform from Google which is designed to scale. Unlike the conventional server code deployment with load balancers, Google App Engine service scales automatically with load balancing without you needing to set up the load balancer / cloned application servers. The downside is that Google App Engine can only support applications written in Python version 2.5 (Django is supported), JAVA and Google's own Google Go Programming language.
App engine is designed so that you don't require Unix / Linux professionals to manage all your servers. As a developer you are independent to write and deploy the code without traffic management headache. Amazon EC2 is also one such service, but you still need some set up with load balancers initially.
Install the Google App Engine SDK
If you already do not have the SDK you should download the SDK as Google App Engine does not seem to have a method to download the app engine source code in a ZIP file via HTTP / FTP. To download the app engine source code from the online cloud, you must install the App Engine SDK for your Operating System. Go to the App engine SDK download page to download the corresponding SDK. Make sure you have Python 2.5 (higher versions should work too) also installed since most of the commands are scripts written in Python. This shouldn't be a problem if you're on *nix environments. Those in Windows should download and install Python.
Downloading the Source Code via the App Engine SDK
- Open up a terminal at the SDK installation location, I am using C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\google_appengine
- Run
python appcfg.py download_app -A App_name -V [Optional Version Number] <Target Folder>
- You will be asked to authenticate to download the app
- If you are authenticated by Google as the owner of the App-engine application, the application files would be downloaded to the target folder specified
- Make sure you give a writable folder as the target_path since by default all folders inside Program Files on Windows can be written only by an administrator user
