If you are not a geek, sorry about these tacky-techy posts. I like posting them to help others geeks running into same problems later.

I’ve been running my GAE apps locally on my Mac using Google App Engine Launcher. The tool makes it simple and easy to develop and test apps designed to run in Google’s App Engine cloud but I ran into a problem when I tried to test my apps with Internet Explorer (running locally in VMware Fusion). Basically IE couldn’t see my apps.

After a few minutes of googling and poking about, I concluded that GAE Launcher was binding my apps to loopback IP (127.0.0.1) instead of an external subnet IP (192.168.0.x). The fix was simple:

1. Stop target application
2. Open its application settings dialog by double-clicking on the app in the list of apps.
3. Add to Extra Flags box: –address=192.168.0.x
4. Start target application. If you have firewall on, you’ll be asked to allow Python.app to accept incoming connections.

Other options for GAE Launcher are:

--help, -h               View this helpful message.
--debug, -d              Use debug logging. (Default false)
--clear_datastore, -c    Clear the Datastore on startup.
--address=ADDRESS, -a    Server binding address
--port=PORT, -p PORT     Port for the server to run on.
--datastore_path=PATH    Path to use for storing Datastore
                         file stub data
--history_path=PATH      Path to use for storing Datastore
                         history
--require_indexes        Disallows queries requiring composite
                         indexes not defined in index.yaml.
--smtp_host=HOSTNAME     SMTP host to send test mail to.
--smtp_port=PORT         SMTP port to send test mail to.
--smtp_user=USER         SMTP user to connect as.
--smtp_password=PASSWORD Password for SMTP server.
--enable_sendmail        Enable sendmail when SMTP is not
                         configured.
--show_mail_body         Log the body of emails in mail stub.
--auth_domain            Authorization domain