Can I update only app.yaml file without uploading all project

Question

Is there a way to update selected files when using the App Engine Flexible env?

I\'m facing an issue whenever I do a small change in the app.yaml file: to test it I wou

Answer 1

The safe/blanket answer would be no as the flex env docker image would need to be updated regardless of how tiny the changes are, see How can I speed up Rails Docker deployments on Google Cloud Platform?

However, there might be something to try (YMMV).

From App Engine Flexible Environment:

• You always have root access to Compute Engine VM instances. SSH access to VM instances in the flexible environment is disabled by default. If you choose, you can enable root access to your app's VM instances.

So you might be able to login as root on your GAE instance VM and try to manually modify a particular app artifact. Of course, you'd need to locate the artifact first.

Some artifacts might not even be present in the VM image itself (those used exclusively by the GAE infra, queue definitions, for example). But it should be possible to update these artifacts without updating the docker image, since they aren't part of the flex env service itself.

Other artifacts might be read-only and it might not be possible to change them to read-write.

Even if possible, such manual changes would be volatile, they would not survive an instance reload (which would be using the unmodified docker image), which might be required for some changes to take effect.

Lots of "might"s, lots of risks (manual fiddling with the app code could negatively impact its functionality), up to you to determine if a try is really worthy.

Update: it seems this is actually documented and supported, see Accessing Google App Engine Python App code in production