No module named warnings when starting GAE inside virtualenv locally

Question

I am trying to run my GAE app locally inside a virtual environment.

I\'ve followed these two articles [1], [2] as reference to setup, but when I source evn/bi

Answer 1

I had this problem when running two AppEngine projects in separate directories at once using dev_appserver.py in a virtualenv.

I found it works correctly if I use absolute paths instead.

Answer 2

All dependencies for standard environment GAE apps (which aren't provided by GAE) must be installed in the app itself, not on your local system. See Using third-party libraries.

Since GAE doesn't care about your local system libraries (besides the basic python 2.7 installation needed to run the development server), using a virtualenv for developing standard env GAE apps doesn't make a lot of sense.

The use of the virtualenv as suggested by the articles you mentioned can actually cause trouble:

• local python libraries can interfere with the GAE runtime-provided equivalent libraries (from the SDK) when running locally (I suspect this is somehow what you're experiencing)
• at deployment time the content of the lib directory (which includes all the site packages for your python installation) will be uploaded to GAE, potentially causing clashes with the GAE runtime-provided libraries or exceeding the app file quota.

So my suggestion is to drop virtualenv (which, in a way, you did when you skipped the virtualenv activation) and follow the official documentation instead.

Answer 3

I've solved it by removing from the skip_files of my .yaml a - venv line. venv is my virtualenv folder, and I still have a - ^venv$ line. In case that helps someone ;-)