Problem Solving: Get Google App Engine working on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty)

google-app-engine-ubuntu

By default the Google App Engine SDK doesn’t run on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackelope)… You can fix it!

After a little searching I noticed neither posts about this issue nor a quick fix were top of the Google rankings… hoping to resolve that with this post and get all of us Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) users up on App Engine. UPDATE: This post is now first when searching for “App Engine Ubuntu Jaunty Problem” and even “App Engine Ubuntu Jaunty” in one day, nice!

Once you download the SDK as usual and run one of your apps on a default Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty install you will see errors galore, you see Ubuntu 9.04 ships Python 2.6 and App Engine is built on Python 2.5 and they are not friendly!

Here is how I got my environment running, I will update the post if I run into further errors.

In a terminal install Python 2.5

They will coexist on the system.

sudo apt-get install python2.5

Edit dev_appserver.py in your google_appengine directory

Change the first line in dev_appserver.py…

#!/usr/bin/env python

….to…

#!/usr/bin/env python2.5

App Engine should now load and run your apps properly!

I believe this is the simplest noninvasive way to let App Engine find what it wants, Python 2.5, and let Ubuntu carry on as it likes with Python 2.6 and beyond. Here is a source on this issue, commenters have many different solutions.

Hope this post helps at least one of you,
-Ben

Related posts:

  1. Getting Windows 7 Beta running on Ubuntu Intrepid via VirtualBox
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19 Responses to Problem Solving: Get Google App Engine working on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty)

  1. paul says:

    Thanks, this is just what I needed – my apps didn’t run any more, and it took me a while to think that it might be because of the python version!

  2. eric says:

    thanks for posting this as I am now running Ubuntu 9.04 64bit exclusively, and truly appreciate all the help I can get.

  3. Mohamed says:

    THANK YOU… I have trying to make app engine work for hrs and the problem was python 2.6…

  4. Great advice – I had done this previously on another machine but this is a far superior and simple technique.

  5. Rajeev Jain says:

    Eclipse 3.4 allows you to choose the compiler, choose 3.5 when running google app engine. You can have both 3.5 and 3.6 peacefully co-exist in eclipse too!

  6. Thanks for sharing the tip, Ben. I’m developing on App Engine using Django with the help of Google’s google-app-engine-django project. Applying the change that you mentioned didn’t resolve an issue I was seeing on my local dev environment. I had to additionally change the first line of my project’s manage.py to use python2.5:
    #!/usr/bin/env python2.5
    Cheers,
    Paul.

  7. Sherry Martin says:

    I’m just an amateur writing a few games here and there, but the tips were right on, Ben. Huge help. Thanks!

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  9. Andre says:

    Strange… I never had this issue. I installed GAE, developed the app I wanted, and launched it. Never had any issues.

  10. I installed jaunty , did not face any problems.. thankfully cause I dont understand any of the grub, python or anything like that :D
    I would like to know how did you disable the notifications from pidgin when any one logs out or logs in! Its very distracting… to have that notification. But I wasn’t able to disable it.

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  14. Google has set the expectation high due to its past Inventions.
    So people use it immediately after its release, and find the limitation immediately.

  15. Perry says:

    Hi,

    Is this still the case with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS- the Lucid Lynx – released in April 2010?
    Does it sill need to be python2.5?
    Where should app engine reside? in Bin?
    http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/tools/devserver.html
    And how do I start the development web server with the dev_appserver.py ?
    From Idle? from the command line?
    (sorry, I am a newbie)

    Perry

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