Free Static Page Hosting on Google App Engine in a 5 minutes

Now-a-days we have a lot of options to deploy our applications. Some of them are Google App Engine, Google Compute Cloud, Amazon EC2, Heroku, Nodejitsu and much more. All the services have their advantages and disadvantages over others. Generally, we do not prefer much complex infrastructure or steps to deploy our static pages. Recently, I found that Google App engine has been a best platform for hosting our static web pages with decent free plan over other services. In this article, we will discuss a steps to host your static pages which can be personal blog, company site or even your client sites.

Create an application in Google App Engine

Visit Google App Engine and then create an application. When creating App engine application, the application id is very important. Because it acts as subdomain for your site. Lets say, application id is coolmoon, the site will be in coolmoon.appspot.com.

Install App Engine SDK for python

Since python has been a best supported language in App Engine, Download and Install App Engine SDK for python. Are you not a python developer(like me)? Do not worry, you do not need to write a single piece of python code.

You will use two commands from the SDK:

dev_appserver.py  -  the development web server
appcfg.py  -  for uploading your app to App Engine

Create an application folder

You have to create an application folder which has static files and configuration file to be deployed. The structure of the folder may be as follows

application_folder/
  - app.yaml              # configuration file. we will see in next section
  - public/               # public folder will contain static files
    - index.html
    - js/
    - css/
    - img/

Content of App Engine configuration(app.yaml)

  application: coolmoon
  version: 1
  runtime: python27
  api_version: 1
  threadsafe: yes

  handlers:

  - url: /(.+)
    static_files: public/\1
    upload: public/(.*)

  - url: /
    static_files: public/index.html
    upload: public/index.html

  skip_files:
  - ^(.*/)?app\.yaml
  - ^(.*/)?app\.yml
  - ^(.*/)?#.*#
  - ^(.*/)?.*~
  - ^(.*/)?.*\.py[co]
  - ^(.*/)?.*/RCS/.*
  - ^(.*/)?\..*
  - ^(.*/)?tests$
  - ^(.*/)?test$
  - ^test/(.*/)?
  - ^COPYING.LESSER
  - ^README\..*
  - \.gitignore
  - ^\.git/.*
  - \.*\.lint$
  - ^fabfile\.py
  - ^testrunner\.py
  - ^grunt\.js
  - ^node_modules/(.*/)?

Test static pages

You can run development server locally and check your static pages by following command

 dev_appserver.py ./

Visit http://localhost:8080 to test your pages.

Deploy

Everything is perfect and deploy the static pages. The command appcfg.py is used for deploy the application to Google App engine

appcfg.py update .

It will ask for email and password of your Google account. The password must be application specific password. To know how to generate application specific password, please refer Application specific password.

You've made it

Finally you got your site hosted in <application-id>.appspot.com. Static hosting is super easy with App Engine. Moreover it is faster than other static hosting services. Because it runs on Google infrastructure.

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Happy static hosting and Have a nice day.