Importing application models from Google cloud shell

Question

I am very, very new to Google App Engine, but I need to administer a WebApp2 (so, Python) -based website that uses it. Specifically I need to filter a queryset and delete certain model instances.

Building the site locally is fine. Locally I can get at the models by hitting

http://localhost:8000/console

in my browser. This pulls up the "interactive console", and in there I can put some code like

from application.models.user import User

and it will work. From there I can create / delete User objects in the Datastore, so this local interactive console seems to have ORM-like functionality. (I'm coming from a Django background, so that's what it reminds me of).

However I don't seem to have this option on the live website. I was hoping to find it at

https://console.cloud.google.com/home/dashboard?project=<my project>

And I thought I had found it when I found the control to "activate google cloud shell". This brings up a command line on the web server, but the website's codebase doesn't seem to exist here, so launching the Python cli and trying to import the applications models like I can do locally doesn't work. And even if I could, I doubt it would be a Django-like ORM the way it is on my local build.

Am I thinking about this in the wrong way? How do you create / filter / delete / etc. Datastore objects via the backend in a GAE / WebApp2 website? Is the "Google cloud shell" even part of the answer?

Answer 1

To get access to your app code in the cloud shell one option would be to create in the shell a local copy of your app repository. For an example (addressing a different question, true) you can peek at Google Cloud: How to deploy mirrored Repository. But I'm not 100% certain if that will automatically give you access to your app's datastore. Worth a try IMHO.

Another option is to hook the desired operations as handler actions inside your app itself and execute them from there. Eventually hidden/protected/restricted via authentication, for example for admin users only. This is what I use for one-time datastore migrations that I need from time to time when I make changes to my entity models.

Finally, but not really a programatic access - you could use the Datastore page in the developer console to manually find, read and modify your entities, see Managing Datastore from the Console.

Answer 2

Use the remote_api_shell. You run this locally where your application code lives. Then you can import your models, and perform the same queries etc, and add modify/delete entities. I use this frequently for a range of tasks. Updating more than 100K records can become slow using this method.

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python/tools/remoteapi