Two Languages in App Engine Development

In my last post I outlined getting Go and PHP to act as modules in the same App Engine instance.  However I only really tested it on a “production” App Engine instance, I didn’t test it in development, because I typically use the Google App Engine SDK for each respective language separately.

When I tried the combined dispatch.yaml on the Google App Engine SDK for PHP I got the following error on a Mac running OS 10.10.2 (Yosemite):

OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/Applications/Development/GoogleAppEngineLauncher.app/Contents/Resources/GoogleAppEngine-default.bundle/Contents/Resources/google_appengine/goroot/pkg/tool’

When I tried the combined dispatch.yaml on the Google App Engine SDK for Go I got the following error:

The development server must be started with the --php_executable_path flag set to the path of the php-cgi binary.

And when  used the -php_executable_path option with any of the copies of PHP on my system – including the ones that are buried in the PHP SDK – I got:

_PHPEnvironmentError: No input file specified.

After struggling a bit with this here is the easiest solution I found:

• Find the location of goroot in the go_appengine folder

• Find the location of the SDK for php by running

  which dev_appserver.py | xargs ls -l

• Create a symbolic link to goroot in go_appengine in the PHP SDK folder that contains dev_appserver.py

After that you can test your dispatch file in development by running:

dev_appserver.py dispatch.yaml api_php/app.yaml  api_go/app.yaml

Where api_php is the folder your PHP module is in, and api_go is… well you know what I’m saying.

Now, I went out of my way there to say this was the easiest way of doing it.  Not that it wasn’t a hack, or that it was a supported way of doing it.  But it does work.

All code show here is licensed under Apache 2. For more details find the original source on Github.