Create your project

Note: If you are deploying a new Python web service to Google Cloud, we recommend getting started with Cloud Run.

To deploy your app to App Engine, you must create a Google Cloud project and your App Engine application resources.

The Google Cloud project is a top-level container that holds your App Engine application and other Google Cloud resources.

The App Engine application is a resource that you must create to enable App Engine. The App Engine application resource defines the region in which you want to run your web service and store its related settings, credentials, and metadata. Only a single App Engine application resource can be created per Google Cloud project and the specified region cannot be changed after those resources are created.

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

Create a Google 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 Google Cloud 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 Google Cloud 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. Run the following gcloud command to enable App Engine and create the associated application resources. Note that the location you select cannot be changed later.

    gcloud app create

App Engine locations

App Engine is regional, which means the infrastructure that runs your apps is located in a specific region, and Google manages it so that it is available redundantly across all of the zones within that region.

Meeting your latency, availability, or durability requirements are primary factors for selecting the region where your apps are run. You can generally select the region nearest to your app's users, but you should consider the locations where App Engine is available as well as the locations of the other Google Cloud products and services that your app uses. Using services across multiple locations can affect your app's latency as well as its pricing.

You cannot change an app's region after you set it.

Note: Two locations, which are called europe-west and us-central in App Engine commands and in the Google Cloud console, are called europe-west1 and us-central1, respectively, elsewhere in Google documentation.

If you already created an App Engine application, you can view its region by doing one of the following:

• Run the gcloud app describe command.

• Open the App Engine Dashboard in the Google Cloud console. The region appears near the top of the page.

OK

Next steps

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