Let's Encrypt and Google App Engine... not a match in heaven

I recently got on the SSL bandwagon for a site I manage, and bought an SSL certificate from GoDaddy for less than $10 (I can't remember exactly), but it only lasted a year.

True to form, when time came up for renewal GoDaddy wanted to charge me $100.

Top Tip: Never, ever allow GoDaddy to autorenew anything you buy from them. Because they alway jack the price up when they autorenew by default.

Anyway, I heard about LetsEncrypt, the new CA which offers SSL certificates for free.

"This must be too good to be true", I thought. And once again, I was proved right.

After much yak-shaving, (installing the prerequisites on my mac, the letsencrypt software, and the appropriate challenge/responses to prove I owned the web servers) I actually managed to sucessfully generate my certificate...

...which expires in 90 days!?!

Now the people at letsencrypt think that 90 days is a really, really long time, and any longer would be a security risk. And they say, "Hey, you should automate all your certificate issuance/renewal/web hosting malarky".

The only problem is, THERE IS NO API TO AUTOMATE UPLOADING OF YOUR CERTIFICATE TO GOOGLE APP ENGINE!!!

So, every 90 days, you will have to do it manually.


And one more thing... when I tried to upload my 4096 bit key certificate, app engine complained with an extremely generic error message. Turns out it only supports a maximum of 2048 bit keys.

Way to be cutting edge Google!

EDIT: Google App Engine has finally automated SSL certifcates issuance and renewal!!!

https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/09/introducing-managed-SSL-for-Google-App-Engine.html

Google weather api is dead... long live wunderground.com

Recently google retired their free weather api... it was never officially supported, and was always a private API, but nonetheless many, many applications came to rely on it, and were rudely broken last month when the api stopped working.

Anyway, this also broke http://sydneyinlinehockey.com, so after some research I settled on wunderground which has a pretty good replacent which is free for up to 500 requests a day. You have to apply for an api key to call it and the response can come back as xml or json. I prefer json as it is so easy to parse python.

It is this easy to call... what are you waiting for? Fix your apps with broken weather now!

Google App Engine with a custom domain

So, you don't want to publish your brand new groundbreaking web app to the world with a boring old url like http://sydneyinlinehockey.appspot.com ?


Just say say you want to use your own custom domain such as sydneyinlinehockey.com.

One would think this would be a relatively simple and straight forward thing to do, but apparently not so...

First they make you sign up to Google Apps, then you have to prove you own the domain, then finally you have to tell them the domain name you plan to use, finally you have to update the details with your dns registrar so it points to google apps hosted website.

This was the tricky bit... so if anyone else wants to know how to do it, here's how I did it.

you need to create a CNAME record for your website,

eg:

www.sydneyinlinehockey.com

and point it to:

ghs.googlehosted.com.

Google app engine does not support naked domains, such as

http://sydneyinlinehockey.com.

to get this to work I setup a 301 redirect with my dns registrar, redirecting

sydneyinlinehockey.com

to

www.sydneyinlinehockey.com

voila.

just posting this cos I spent hours googling this...

Installing Python Image Library (PIL) with jpeg support on mac os 10.7.4

Recently I have been playing with Google App Engine - I'm porting the  Sydney Inline Hockey website from PHP (ugh!) to Google App Engine using Python.

Anyway, in order to use the google image library to manipulate images in App Engine, you need to have Python Image Library installed locally if you want to test your code.

Python's easy_install module maged to install PIL, however at runtime it would crash with an error about no jpeg decoder. No jpeg support was a bit of a dealbreaker... it seems libjpeg needs to be installed before PIL.

That's cool - lets just install libjpeg using fink, which seems to be one of a myriad of different tools for installing package on unix systems. But I didn't have fink installed...

after much yak shaving, I was finally able to to type:

sudo fink install libjpeg
sudo easy_install PIL

and it was all good!

For detailed instructions - see this post on Marcio Garcia's blog. Thanks Marcio!