CODEWITHSUNDEEP
google-app-enginegoogle-cloud-shell
Brian
Brian

Reputation: 3958

Google App Engine Project Root Location

Apologies for the seemingly obvious question, but I figure the answer might help others. I can't for the life of me find documentation on the filepath within the Google App Engine VM (Cloud Shell) where I can find the static files being served from. I need to pull the latest upstream changes from a private github repo.

Note that I navigated elsewhere in the VM and even restarting the session didn't put me in a default project root path within the VM as I expected it to.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3998

Answers (1)

Jofre
Jofre

Reputation: 3898

There are several issues to address here:

The Cloud Shell is a virtual shell

Google Cloud Shell is an interactive shell environment for Google Cloud Platform.

The environment where you're working is a container running in a VM in a Google-owned project inside GCP.

You can verify this by checking the metadata server (only available for GCP VMs):

curl -H 'Metadata-Flavor:Google' "http://metadata.google.internal/computeMetadata/v1/?recursive=true&alt=text"

In the metadata provided you'll see how this container is created and configured.

The Cloud Shell is tied to the user, so you'll always access the same environment if you access it with the same credentials, no matter the project. However, if you access with a different user, you'll get a different environment.

You can't access GAE standard instances

GAE is a fully managed environment, and you won't be able to access it. In this way, you won't be able to find the root of the running app engine project.

However, by the way GAE deploys your code, it uses a staging bucket to gather the code before compiling. You can find your staging bucket through the App Engine Admin API. This is usually staging.<PROJECT_ID>.appspot.com, although you can change this configuration. You can get your files from there.

You can access GAE flex apps

However, the deployment in flex gets your files, build a Docker container with them, and then deploys this container inside a VM.

As per the docs, you can connect directly to your container by running:

gcloud app instances ssh [INSTANCE-NAME] --service [SERVICE] --version [VERSION] 
docker exec -it gaeapp /bin/bash

Regarding your issue

According what you say in the comments of the question, your issue could come from a myriad of places. From changing the shell you're connecting to, to resetting your shell environment (deleting all the files), to a thousand different possible problems.

The best way to think about it is regard the Cloud Shell as a temporal environment to run commands, but not as a virtual machine.

Knowing that, you could mount a persistent filesystem (GCS through GCSFuse, Cloud Filestore, ...) to persist your work, or simply use Git to have your work always synced on a repo.

GAE Flex has some nice CI integrations, so that's a plus for going the Git route.

Upvotes: 9

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