How to include third party Python libraries in Google App Engine?

Question

How to add third party python libraries in Google App Engine, which are not provided by Google? I am trying to use BeautifulSoup in Google App Engine and unable to do so. But my question is for any library I want to use in Google App Engine.

Answer 1

Google has provided a documented way for included third-party libraries in your GAE project.

See the "Adding Third-party Packages to the Application" section of the Libraries in Python 2.7 docs.

If you want to include additional pure-python third-party packages, you can do so by setting up vendoring. Vendoring allows you to install packages to a subdirectory of your project and include them in your code. To use vendoring, create (or modify) appengine_config.py in the root of your project.

from google.appengine.ext import vendor # Add any libraries installed in the "lib" folder. vendor.add('lib') 

And then just put all your libs' source code in your lib dir

> pip install beautifulsoup4 -t lib 

So your project directory structure looks like this:

project - lib   - bs4 - your_code.py 

This will allow your project's source files to import libs' packages/modules as if they were added to your PYTHON_PATH. For example:

# file: your_code.py import bs4  # no need for 'from lib import bs4' # do stuff with bs4... 

You can also easily install everything from a requirements.txt file by doing the following command

> pip install -t lib -r requirements.txt