Recommend place for google appengine launcher files to reside?

Question

There is no launcher for google appengine like you have on the windows environs. However there is a workaround.

Problem is I copied everything to my ~/Downloads/google-appengine-launcher folder. It worked okay. In the shell I just cd to the above path and do ./GoogleAppengineLauncher.py; it works!!

But since that being a user specific folder I moved it to another generic location: /usr/share/apps, and I added a symbolic link to the above script as follows:

ln -s /usr/share/apps/google-appengine-launcher/GoogleAppengineLauncher.py /usr/bin/google-appengine-launcher

Now I do Alt+F2 to bring the Run dialog, and type in google-appengine-launcher, appengine application windows loads, but there is an error message saying it can't load icons...why is this so? How to fix this?

Answer 1

There is no official way, but here is how I do it and it works out well...

This dir may already be created for you if you have Google Chrome installed. If not, lets create it then move the folder inside:

sudo mkdir -p /opt/google/
mv /usr/share/apps/google-appengine-launcher /opt/google

Now edit your ~/.bashrc file and at the very bottom add:

export PATH=/opt/google/google-appengine-launcher:$PATH

Then run:

source ~/.bashrc

You may need to log out and back in for Alt+F2 to work (I'm not certain). But that should be all you need to do.

One last note, make sure and remove your symlink from before.

To have a simpler name as a start-up command:

Create an alias, shell function, a script, or a desktop shortcut.

For example, to create an alias, add this to .bashrc:

alias start_gae='GoogleAppEngineLauncher.py'

Then it's only necessary to enter start_gae at the shell prompt.