Creating your project

To deploy your app on App Engine, you must create a Google Cloud project, which is a top level container that holds your App Engine application resources as well as other Google Cloud resources.

In this task, you create a Cloud project and an App Engine application to store settings, computing resources, credentials, and metadata for your app.

If you already have a Cloud project with App Engine and the Cloud Build API enabled, continue to Writing Your Web Service.

Creating a Cloud project

1. Sign in to your Google Cloud account. If you're new to Google Cloud, create an account to evaluate how our products perform in real-world scenarios. New customers also get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.

2. In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

   Note: If you don't plan to keep the resources that you create in this procedure, create a project instead of selecting an existing project. After you finish these steps, you can delete the project, removing all resources associated with the project.

   Go to project selector

3. Make sure that billing is enabled for your Cloud project. Learn how to check if billing is enabled on a project.

4. Enable the Cloud Build API.

   Enable the API

5. Install the Google Cloud CLI.

6. To initialize the gcloud CLI, run the following command:

   gcloud init

7. In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

   Note: If you don't plan to keep the resources that you create in this procedure, create a project instead of selecting an existing project. After you finish these steps, you can delete the project, removing all resources associated with the project.

   Go to project selector

8. Make sure that billing is enabled for your Cloud project. Learn how to check if billing is enabled on a project.

9. Enable the Cloud Build API.

   Enable the API

10. Install the Google Cloud CLI.

11. To initialize the gcloud CLI, run the following command:

    gcloud init

12. Create an App Engine application for your Cloud project in the Google Cloud console.

    Open app creation

13. Select a region where you want your app's computing resources located.

    Note: After you create your App Engine app, you cannot change the region. To reduce latency, choose the region closest to your app's intended users. For more information on the available regions, see App Engine Locations.

Next steps

Now that your Cloud project is set up, you're ready to write a basic web service with Node.js.