Downloading App Engine source code

Question

So it seems from a few SO questions I\'ve seen that this is a problem among other users. Recently one of our head dev\'s left and I inherited a lot of his projects. One of w

Answer 1

When you deploy an App Engine Flexible application, the source code is uploaded to Cloud Storage on your project in a bucket named staging.<project-id>.appspot.com. You can navigate in this bucket and download the source code for a specific version as a .tar file.

Alternatively, you can find the exact Cloud Storage URL for your source code by going to Dev Console > Container Registry > Build History and select the build for your version. You'll find the link to your source code under Build Information.

One thing to note however is that the staging... bucket is created by default with a Lifecycle rule that deletes files older than 15 days automatically. You can delete this rule if you want so that all versions' source code is kept indefinitely.

In your case I believe that may not have helped since files may have been deleted already but it's worth knowing you can get the source code from there (source code isn't pushed to Source Repository by default, your developer had to configure it manually).

Answer 2

In the developer console you can select the respective project and check:

• on the Services page - which services, AKA modules - as they used to be (and still are) called in various places, you app has deployed
• on the Versions page - which versions for each of the services are deployed

This information is what appcfg.py download_app expects. See also:

• the various appcfg.py options using its --help flag
• How do I download a specific service's source code off of AppEngine?

You can also access the deployed source code live (if everything else fails it could still be a last resort method to get the code, but tedious), see my answer to Google Cloud DataStore automatic indexing

Update:

I just now noticed in your screenshot that it's a flexible environment app. The appcfg.py docs are in the standard environment section, I suspect it's not applicable to the flexible environment, for which what's deployed is actually a docker image built during the deployment operation. From Deploying your application:

Deploy your app to App Engine using the gcloud app deploy command. This command automatically builds a container image by using the Container Builder service and then deploys that image to the App Engine flexible environment. The container will include any local modifications that you've made to the runtime image.

It might be possible to access the code on the actual GCE instance running the app, by connecting to the running instance and starting a shell in your app container, see Connecting to the instance