How to go about updating the GAE SDK?

Question

I'm thinking about updating my version of the GAE SDK (1.5.1 -> 1.5.4). However, I've never updated a SDK before and I can't find any tools provided by GAE to facilitate this task nor am I aware that GAE does this automatically.

I realize I could just download the new version of the SDK and reconfigure it manually to suit my situation but this process seems error prone and excessive. Is there a systematic or conventional way that most programmers accomplish this task?

Answer 1

Delete (uninstall) the old SDK; install the new one. That's what I do on my personal (Linux) laptop. Co-workers who use MacOS do the same.

The only "reconfiguration" I've found necessary is when using the Google Plugin for Eclipse, which needs to be prodded to copy the new Java jars into my Java projects' WEB-INF/lib directories. Python hasn't required any reconfiguration at all.

Answer 2

In terms of the GAE SDK updating, the production environment is updated automatically by Google. That is to say whenever a new version being released, the production version will be updated to that new version. So you never need to worry about the version being running in production environment.

Regarding the local testing environment, some manual task is needed to update the version. As @splix asked what language you are actually using, the process may vary a bit. In my case as a Java developer, we are here using Maven plugin to handle all this stuff. So essentially what you need to do is update your pom.xml to point to the right version of GAE, and run mvn gae:unpack, all latest version will be downloaded and used by your local environment.

This process is also pretty handy in Eclipse plugin, as basically what you need to do is update the Google Plugin for Eclipse as what you had done to install it. And after that, the local environment will pick up the latest version it got.

I am not a Python guy, so if you are after Python, my above answer my not be helpful. Sorry about that.