I’ve started to get into Google’s App Engine again, and have started developing a simple product that I had a use for. The initial first draft was a quick 200 lines in webapp, and it worked great. However, I’m starting to find certain things quite cumbersome. I’m a huge fan of Django, and but also about keeping things as simple as possible, which is why I picked webapp to begin with. I’m now considering making a swap to Django, but there are some development issues; namely, I’m using Ubuntu 10.04, Python 2.6, and Django 1.2. This setup presents several setbacks, as GAE has the requirement of Django 1.1 and Python 2.5. There are two solutions that I found: a) use virtualenv, …

All my Django sites are running 1.2, which poses a conflict with writing apps for Google’s App Engine, as use_library currently only supports < Django 1.1. There are two solutions that I found: a) use virtualenv, or b) chroot, which I’ve already detailed. This document will hopefully show you how to create a virtual environment to use a secondary django version, especially for GAE. Of the two options, I think this one is a bit quicker, but there will likely be tradeoffs that a chroot environment can deal with better, e.g. python imaging (I don’t use it for GAE). First, install PIP and virtualenv: