Peer Pressure

Smooth TiddlyWeb on App Engine

It’s been possible to run TiddlyWeb on Google App Engine for more than a year now, but the process to get things started and keep code up to date has been cumbersome. Recent changes to how TiddlyWeb is packaged and deployed have made the process a good deal easier. Assuming you can satisfy the following requirements

• Google App Engine SDK
• pip
• virtualenv
• git
• Some version of make

then here is the process to get a basic working app:

git clone git://github.com/tiddlyweb/tiddlyweb-plugins.git 
cd tiddlyweb-plugins/googleappengine
make go

After that process completes, in the subdirectory called go will be a working app engine application of tiddlywebwiki. You can host with you local SDK appengine launcher or toolset and visit it at http://0.0.0.0:8080/. If you want to deploy it to appspot.com you will need to:

• Edit app.yaml to change the name of the application.
• Edit tiddlywebconfig.py to change the host in the non-dev server_host configuration item.

What make go does is install all the necessary requirements into a virtualenv and then symlink them into an app engine directory.

So now what? Now you have a TiddlyWeb setup with no content and no clear way to add content. Either read the README in the tiddlyweb-plugins/googleappengine directory, or wait for my next blog post.