Testing and Deploying Your Application

Region ID

The REGION_ID is an abbreviated code that Google assigns based on the region you select when you create your app. The code does not correspond to a country or province, even though some region IDs may appear similar to commonly used country and province codes. For apps created after February 2020, REGION_ID.r is included in App Engine URLs. For existing apps created before this date, the region ID is optional in the URL.

Learn more about region IDs.

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Learn how to run your application locally, deploy it, and test on App Engine.

Running locally

To test your application's functionality before deploying, run your application in your local environment with the development tools that you usually use.

For details, including specific commands depending on your plugin, see Local testing for the Java 8/Jetty 9 runtime or Local testing for the Java 8 runtime.

Deploying your application

Before you begin

Before you can deploy your application:

• The Owner of the Cloud project must enable App Engine.

• Ensure that your user account includes the required privileges.

Deploying a service

You can use any of the supported tools to deploy your Java application to the App Engine flexible environment. For command-line deployment, use gcloud app deploy from the gcloud CLI, or use the Maven or the Gradle plugins. To deploy using an IDE, use the IntelliJ or Eclipse plugins. To programmatically deploy your apps, use the Admin API.

Ignoring files

You can use a .gcloudignore file to specify files and directories not to upload to Google Cloud when you deploy your services. This is useful for ignoring build artifacts and other files that do not need to be uploaded with your deployment.

Note: You cannot specify the skip_files field in your app.yaml file if you have a .gcloudignore file.

Learn more about the syntax of the .gcloudignore file in the gcloud reference.

Manually building a container for deployment

To build your container images outside of Google Cloud Platform, you must first upload your images to a container image repository before you can deploy your images to App Engine with the gcloud app deploy command.

For example, if you build your container images locally with Docker, you can push those images to Google Container Registry and then specify the URL of your image in the --image-url flag of the command:

gcloud app deploy src/main/appengine/app.yaml --image-url gcr.io/YOUR_PROJECT_ID/YOUR_CONTAINER_IMAGE

Using automated continuous deployment pipelines

You can use Cloud Build to automate deployments in continuous deployment pipelines. For more information, see Deploying artifacts, and Automating Builds using Build Triggers in the Cloud Build documentation.

Docker base images for Java

If you'd like to build a Java custom runtime application from scratch, use a provided base image in your Dockerfile:

Runtime	Docker command
Java 8	FROM gcr.io/google_appengine/openjdk
Java 8 / Jetty 9	FROM gcr.io/google-appengine/jetty

Viewing your application

After you deploy your application to App Engine, you can run the following command to launch your browser and view it at https://PROJECT_ID.REGION_ID.r.appspot.com:

gcloud app browse

Testing on App Engine

Before configuring a new version to receive traffic, you can test it on App Engine. For example, to test a new version of your default service:

1. Deploy your new version with the promote parameter set to false:

   • With Maven, set the promote parameter in your pom.xml file.
   • With Gradle, set the promote parameter in your gradle.build file.

2. Access your new version by navigating to the following URL:

   https://VERSION_ID-dot-default-dot-PROJECT_ID.REGION_ID.r.appspot.com

   Note: You can find the version ID in the Cloud console, or specify one when you deploy with the version parameter.

   Now you can test your new version in the App Engine runtime environment. You can debug your application by viewing its logs in the Google Cloud console Logs Explorer. For more information, see Writing Application Logs.

   Requests sent to https://PROJECT_ID.REGION_ID.r.appspot.com will still be routed to the version previously configured to receive traffic.

3. When you want to send traffic to the new version, use the Cloud console to migrate traffic:

   Manage versions

   Select the version you just deployed and click Migrate traffic.

You can use the same process to test new versions of other services by replacing default in the URL with your service's name:

For more information about targeting specific services and versions, see How Requests are Routed.

Troubleshooting

The following are common error messages that you might encounter when deploying apps:

PERMISSION_DENIED: Operation not allowed

The "appengine.applications.create" permission is required.

If the Cloud project does not include the required App Engine application, the gcloud app deploy command can fail when it tries to run the gcloud app create command. Only accounts with Owner role have the necessary permissions to create App Engine applications.

502 Bad Gateway

The Cloud project can fail to start if the app.yaml is misconfigured. Check the app logs for more detailed error messages.

[13] An internal error occurred while creating a Cloud Storage bucket.

App Engine creates a default Cloud Storage multi-regional bucket on your behalf, on the same region where your application is created. This bucket is required to store the contents of your application. This error is returned when this bucket cannot be created, in the following scenarios:

• The default App Engine flexible environment service agent is not present in your project, or doesn't have the App Engine flexible environment Service Agent role. You can add back the agent's service account in your project by granting it the correct IAM permissions.

• The App Engine service account is not present in your project. If the App Engine service account was removed before 30 days elapsed since its deletion, you can restore it.

• Your project is under an organization enforcing the constraints/gcp.resourceLocations policy, and the organization is not allowing the creation of resources on the same region where your App Engine was created. You will need to override the enforced constraints/gcp.resourceLocations policy for your project, and allow the multi-region locations on the same region where your App Engine app is created.

Note: For example, if your App Engine app is created on the europe-west region, even though the region maps to the europe-west1 locations, you will have to modify the constraint to allow resources in the in:eu-locations, which includes all the EU regions. This is required as the App Engine created buckets are multi-regional. If your App Engine application is created on US and ASIA regions, you would have to allow in:us-locations or in:asia-locations, respectively.

[13] An internal error occurred.

This error can occur if you are deploying your service with a network configuration using a Shared VPC setup. Ensure that your App Engine flexible environment fulfills all the requirements for this configuration. Next, make sure that the configured service accounts for this setup are present in your project, otherwise you will have to restore the accounts. Note that the region of the subnet in the Shared VPC host project, must match the location where your App Engine environment was created.

If the issue persists after ensuring your app.yaml configuration is valid, use the Google Cloud SDK to re-deploy your service, adding the --verbosity=debug flag, and contact GCP Support by providing the command's output.

IP space of {USER_SUBNETWORK_NAME} is exhausted and needs to be expanded.

If the deployment fails with this error message, it means that the network configured for the App Engine service doesn't have addresses left to allocate, for the new instances of the service. You can resolve the issue by expanding the VPC ranges on the subnet configured for your App Engine flexible environment service.