I have a minimal Django project that I am trying to deploy onto Google App Engine Managed VMs. I'm having a bit of trouble understanding exactly what is going on and what is serving what. I have an app.yaml file that looks like this:
runtime: custom
vm: true
entrypoint: custom
api_version: 1
manual_scaling:
instances: 1
handlers:
- url: /static
static_dir: static
- url: /.*
script: DjangoVM.wsgi.application
And a dockerfile that looks like this:
FROM gcr.io/google_appengine/python
RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get -y install python-numpy python-scipy
ADD requirements.txt /app/requirements.txt
RUN pip install -r /app/requirements.txt
ADD . /app
CMD gunicorn DjangoVM.wsgi
My requirements.txt looks like this:
Django==1.8.5
gunicorn==19.3.0
scikit-learn==0.16.1
The site deploys okay, but my static files aren't showing up. So on a sandboxed app engine project the handlers in the app.yaml take care of serving my static content. Do I have to configure an nginx server or similar server in my dockerfile to serve static content?
To help me understand this, if I didn't have gunicorn serving my application, does App Engine not serve it by default using the handlers? i.e. What would happen if I didn't have CMD gunicorn DjangoVM.wsgi? Does a custom runtime mean that app engine will not serve my application by default and I have to specify a particular WSGI server? The documentation is not very thorough for Managed VMs yet. Sorry if the questions seem a bit confusing, but it reflects my current confusion on the subject as well. Thanks for any help!
It looks like you've confused two things here.
There are two ways of deploying a managed vm: using a standard runtime, in this case Python, and using a custom runtime.
The standard runtime is basically an App Engine app; you define your routes in app.yaml as usual. The runtime value should be "python27". However, you don't need a Dockerfile, and so it wouldn't include nginx or gunicorn; the routes are served by the App Engine runtime.
A custom runtime is defined by giving a runtime value of "custom". This is a completely custom app, defined by a Dockerfile. You don't declare routes in app.yaml, and they need to be served by properly-configured nginx/gunicorn within your container.