Move database from local datastore to another local datastore - google-app-engine

I and my friend are working on a GWT-Google App Engine project, using Tortoise SVN and Google Code to synchronize the code.
We also synchronize the local_db.bin file in appengine-generated folder. But we cant get it work. After synchronize the db file, our local datastore is not updated as we expected.
That is a pain. Im worrying about our future, when our database get bigger and more complicated #A#.
Anyone please give me an advice. What should i do to synchronize our local datastore?

I have to suggestions:
1) Use remote api : https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/remote_api to share a GAE hosted db locally.
2) Maybe you can use Gdrive to sync folders.

This is a really bad idea. Even if you weren't having trouble making both ends read from the same datastore file, the local datastore is in a binary format, and thus you won't both be able to work on the app at the same time, or you'll get merge conflicts you will be unable to resolve.
Instead, both for collaboration purposes and for testing and deployment, you should provide a set of test data you can easily load into the datastore. Store the test data in version control, and load it in using bulkloader or your own code.

Related

Importing application models from Google cloud shell

I am very, very new to Google App Engine, but I need to administer a WebApp2 (so, Python) -based website that uses it. Specifically I need to filter a queryset and delete certain model instances.
Building the site locally is fine. Locally I can get at the models by hitting
http://localhost:8000/console
in my browser. This pulls up the "interactive console", and in there I can put some code like
from application.models.user import User
and it will work. From there I can create / delete User objects in the Datastore, so this local interactive console seems to have ORM-like functionality. (I'm coming from a Django background, so that's what it reminds me of).
However I don't seem to have this option on the live website. I was hoping to find it at
https://console.cloud.google.com/home/dashboard?project=<my project>
And I thought I had found it when I found the control to "activate google cloud shell". This brings up a command line on the web server, but the website's codebase doesn't seem to exist here, so launching the Python cli and trying to import the applications models like I can do locally doesn't work. And even if I could, I doubt it would be a Django-like ORM the way it is on my local build.
Am I thinking about this in the wrong way? How do you create / filter / delete / etc. Datastore objects via the backend in a GAE / WebApp2 website? Is the "Google cloud shell" even part of the answer?
To get access to your app code in the cloud shell one option would be to create in the shell a local copy of your app repository. For an example (addressing a different question, true) you can peek at Google Cloud: How to deploy mirrored Repository. But I'm not 100% certain if that will automatically give you access to your app's datastore. Worth a try IMHO.
Another option is to hook the desired operations as handler actions inside your app itself and execute them from there. Eventually hidden/protected/restricted via authentication, for example for admin users only. This is what I use for one-time datastore migrations that I need from time to time when I make changes to my entity models.
Finally, but not really a programatic access - you could use the Datastore page in the developer console to manually find, read and modify your entities, see Managing Datastore from the Console.
Use the remote_api_shell. You run this locally where your application code lives. Then you can import your models, and perform the same queries etc, and add modify/delete entities. I use this frequently for a range of tasks. Updating more than 100K records can become slow using this method.
https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python/tools/remoteapi

How to setup data fixtures in Google App Engine for Go

I would like to have some data fixtures put into data store when my go project is deployed, similar to what can be done in Django. Is it possible? If not, are there any alternatives?
if your are looking for some configuration to put data into datastore, the answer is no. also the python and java versions of appengine don't have such feature.
what i think the django framework for appengine is doing, is the same as you could do.
just write the data you need to the datastore inside your app init method
also inside init you check if the data is already written.
then any time the app is startet, he checks if it should write some fixture data to datastore, and you can be sure that before first request is processed that its there.

Replicating data from GAE data store

We have an application that we're deploying on GAE. I've been tasked with coming up with options for replicating the data that we're storing the the GAE data store to a system running in Amazon's cloud.
Ideally we could do this without having to transfer the entire data store on every sync. The replication does not need to be in anything close to real time, so something like a once or twice a day sync would work just fine.
Can anyone with some experience with GAE help me out here with what the options might be? So far I've come up with:
Use the Google provided bulkloader.py to export the data to CSV and somehow transfer the CSV to Amazon and process there
Create a Java app that runs on GAE, reads the data from the data store and sends the data to another Java app running on Amazon.
Do those options work? What would be the gotchas with those? What other options are there?
You could use a logic similar to what App Engine HRD migration or backup tool are doing:
Mark modified entities with a child entity marker
Run a MapperPipeline using App Engine mapreduce library iterating on those entity using a Datastore Input Reader
In your map function fetch the parent entity and serialize it to Google Storage using a File Output Writer and remove the marker
Ping the remote host to import those entity from the Google Storage url
As an alternative to 3 and 4, you could make multiple urlfetch(POST) to send each serialized entity to the remote host directly, but it is more fragile as an single failure could compromise the integrity of your data import.
You could look at the datastore admin source code for inspiration.

Prevent database from being cleaned up on re-deploy

When I re-deploy an app to the app engine, the app the existing data in the datastore is cleaned-up.
How do I prevent this from happening?
Update:1 I am using Java, 1.6.3. This is on the production system.
the datastore in production does not get flushed if you redeploy. if you change model definitions and structures it might be that the data you need does not belong to the new(er) model definition...
if you are speaking about the datastore on your local machine start the dev server with the
--datastore_path=/tmp/myapp_datastore myapp
if you are using python. don't know what the equivalent for the java SDK is.
you need to provide more details.
It might be that you are changing the app name just prior to deployment (so you're deploying to the correct app). But previous data in your local datastore was stored under the prior name. If you don't change the app name back before using the local datastore again, it can appear as though the data has disappeared.

how can I change my app-id in GAE and still access the same permanent datastore?

I am developing an app locally in Google App Engine. I have built a small datastore for development purposes. Rebuilding it after every power cycle on my Mac got tedious so I made it permanent. Now I run my app locally with the following command:
/usr/local/bin/dev_appserver.py "--datastore_path=./permanent.datastore" appengine_prototype
Life is good. I have decided to deploy my app so I can test http post commands from a different machine. When I tried to register my current application id (example), I found that it was unavailable (shocker!). So I registered a different application id and planned to change my local application id to match. However, when I changed the
application: *app-id*
line in my app.yaml file, my app stopped recognizing my permanent datastore.
So, how can I change my application id to the one I registered, maintain the connection to the permanent datastore and then push the whole shebang online? I tried running the app twice locally, first with the permanent datastore referenced in the command and then without, hoping that the default temporary datastore would inherit from the previous permanent datastore. That didn't work. Do I need to start by copying the permanent datastore to the default temporary datastore? How would I do that? Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
Dessie
If your intention is to eventually push your local data to your live environment anyway, then your best bet is to:
use bulkloader.py to backup your local data (while using oldid in your config)
then change your config to your newid
then use bulkloader.py to push your data to your new development server (ran with --datastore_path=./permanent.datastore2 or something)
then use bulkloader.py to push your data to the GAE production server
Details of bulkloader.py can be found in the docs and an example here

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