Testing Push Queues in the Development Server

This page describes some limitations with using the local development server (dev_appserver) to test push queues in your application. In most respects, you set up your queues and tasks just as you would to run them in the App Engine production environment, but there are some differences:

  • The development server doesn't respect the rate and bucket-size attributes of your queues. As a result, tasks are executed as close to their ETA as possible. Setting a rate of 0 doesn't prevent tasks from being executed automatically.
  • The development server doesn't preserve queue state across restarts.

To prevent push tasks from running in the development server at all, use the following command:

dev_appserver.py --enable_task_running no

For more detailed information on the options available using the local development server, see here.