Confusing behavior with pygeocoder and Google App Engine with Sockets

Question

For my web app, I am trying to get around the httplib file size limitation, which Google says to use sockets for:

https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/sockets/

I am able to download the file perfectly fine after I add this to my app.yaml file:

 env_variables:
    GAE_USE_SOCKETS_HTTPLIB : 'anyvalue'

But then the pygeocoder library fails:

ConnectionError: HTTPSConnectionPool(host='maps.google.com', port=443): 
Max retries exceeded with url: /maps/api/geocode/jsonregion=&sensor=false&bounds=&language=
&address=New+York%2CNew+York+United+States
(Caused by <class 'google.appengine.api.remote_socket._remote_socket_error.error'>: 
[Errno 13] Permission denied)

I imported SSL into my app.yaml by the following:

- name: ssl
  version: latest

When I remove the env_variables part in my app.yaml file, pygeocoder library works again (however, my ability to download a large remote file breaks). I need both geocoder functionality, as well as the ability to download the remote file. Is there an added configuration step that I am missing somehow? Thanks

Answer 1

According to the socket documentation "Google IP ranges (except those whitelisted below), are blocked". You're calling google maps api, which would be blocked.