App Engine Deploy

Environment and Deployment Manager for Google App Engine Applications.

Supports multiple modules and multiple deployment targets (i.e. deploy to multiple unique appid's).

Working towards this: http://12factor.net/config

Table of Contents

• Example deploy.json
• Command Line
• Labels
• Installing with Composer
• Code Separation

What is this? Is it different from appcfg.py / gcloud?

This allows you to deploy the same code/application to multiple target environments (local, multiple different App Engine projects).

Critically, it also allows you to manage environment variables distinctly for each deployment target.

This tool uses gcloud command line tool to actually push the deployments out.

It builds temporary application yaml file and environment yaml file at deploy time.

Example deploy.json file

Deployment targets and environments are configured in deploy.json, usually in your project root.

Here's a quick example where we have different database credentials for alpha and live environments.

{
    "targets": {
        "alpha": {
            "app_id": "myapp-alpha",
            "version": "alpha++",
            "require_label": false,
            "environment": {
                "APP_DB_USER": "root",
                "APP_DB_NAME": "DatabaseName",
                "APP_DB_SOCKET": "/cloudsql/myapp:instance"
            }
        },
        "live": {
            "app_id": "myapp",
            "version": "2",
            "require_label": true,
            "environment": {
                "APP_DB_USER": "root",
                "APP_DB_NAME": "LiveDatabaseName",
                "APP_DB_SOCKET": "/cloudsql/myapp:instance"
            }
        }
    }
}

Required: yaml include placeholder

To avoid a full-blown yaml parser, please ensure you have the following include line in your module yaml file:

- .env.blank.yaml

It should come AFTER any other includes you have, to ensure we can overwrite environment variables at deploy time.

includes:
- .env.yaml
- .env.blank.yaml

Local development environment

You can configure the environment variables for your local development server in your yaml files like this:

env_variables:
  APP_DB_USER: root
  APP_DB_NAME: localdb

Usage

Deployment targets configured in deploy.json are executed using the deploy command, which is made available the vendor/bin folder by Composer.

For example, from your project root:

Deploy the examples module to the alpha target environment

vendor/bin/deploy --run --module=examples --target=alpha

Create a template deploy.json file

vendor/bin/deploy --init

Show the planned gcloud command for a deployment, but do not run it

vendor/bin/deploy --test --module=default --target=live

List the configured deployment targets

vendor/bin/deploy --verbose targets

Default Module

You can use either app or default to deploy the default App Engine module (which is configured in your app.yaml file).

Targets

Each target is a different deployment, like "staging" and "production".

They must be uniquely named.

Versions

If you suffix your version name with ++ then we will auto-increment the version on each deployment.

In the example above, the first deployment gets alpha1 and the second alpha2 and so on.

In order to do this, we have to be able to detect what versions are already running. So, if you delete all your versions, we will start at 1 again.

Labels

You can supply a version label like this:

vendor/bin/deploy --run --module=examples --target=alpha --label=rel200

When the code is deployed, the label will be suffixed to the version number. So, for example if the version is "alpha3":

alpha3-rel200

If your configuration defines "require_label" as true, when you deploy to that target, you will be required to enter a label. This is particularly useful for production environments, for managing feature releases, etc.

Important Labels must match the following regex: [a-zA-Z0-9_]+ (one or more alphanumerics or underscores)

Code Separation, Redirects

You can "redirect" from your deploy.json file to another, usually intended for situations where your environment configurations are stored in another version control repository.

So, this might be your deploy file from your application folder:

{
    "file":"../vendor/my-company/my-app-environment/deploy.json"
}

Installing this tool

In your composer.json require section:

{
  "venditan/appengine-deploy": "1.1.*"
}

or with the command line

composer require venditan/appengine-deploy:1.1.*