How to Implement Warmup Request for Global Var Initialization

Question

I'm working on a GAE app and I want to do a one time initialization where I set some global variables. Currently I just do that in main.py, but it seems like the correct way to do this sort of thing is with Warmup Requests.

Where is the best place to put one-time and every-time code in GAE/Python?

https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/adminconsole/instances#Loading_Requests

Can somebody explain to me a bit more in detail where the code should go to make this work using webapp2? In the simple use case, I just want to set a global variable that has a list of names and be able to access it anywhere else in the app. For instance:

# init code
NAMES = ['u1', 'u2', 'u3']
# somewhere else in the app
if 'u1' in NAMES:
    # do stuff

Answer 1

Put you initialisation phase in a module. Save the values in the module at import time Then import it in appengine_config.py it is always loaded before any of your code.

https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/tools/appengineconfig

Then elsewhere in you code import the module and referent to the name in you case .NAMES for instance

Put code in you initialisation phase that only does the work once.