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.

  1. Go to the App Engine dashboard on the Google Cloud Platform Console and press the Create button.
  2. 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.
  3. 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
  4. 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.

  1. We'll need a sample application to publish. If you've not got one to use, download and unzip this sample app.
  2. Have a look at the sample application's structure — the website folder contains your website content and app.yaml is your application configuration file.
    • Your website content must go inside the website folder, and its landing page must be called index.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.

Publishing your application

Now that we've got our project made and sample app files collected together, let's publish our app.

  1. Open Google Cloud Shell.
  2. Drag and drop the sample-app folder into the left pane of the code editor.
  3. Run the following in the command line to select your project:
    gcloud config set project gaesamplesite
    
  4. Then run the following command to go to your app's directory:
    cd sample-app
    
  5. You are now ready to deploy your application, i.e. upload your app to App Engine:
    gcloud app deploy
    
  6. Enter a number to choose the region where you want your application located.
  7. Enter Y to confirm.
  8. 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