One powerful, but often overlooked, feature of running applications on App Engine is the ability to have multiple versions of your application deployed and running simultaneously. This feature is invaluable when it comes to being able to “smoke test” a new version of your site live in production before your users can see it. Or you can use traffic splitting to allow you to test different versions of your site against live traffic in a controlled and deterministic fashion.
The release of WordPress 3.5.2 is a great opportunity for us to demonstrate how to use versions to do a controlled upgrade of our WordPress blog to the latest version.
A Note About App Engine Versions
Before we get started on the steps for running multiple versions of your application, we should briefly describe application versions and the default version. App Engine allows you to deploy up to 10 versions of your application to the production servers. Versions are completely independent of each other, and in fact versions can even be using different runtimes – so you can deploy a PHP application and a Java application as different versions of the same appspot application and run them simultaneously. Versions are identified by the version string that you specify either in the app.yaml file or as a command line paramater when using the appcfg.py tool. If you specify the version as a command line option then it will override the version that is supplied in the app.yaml file.
The first time that you upload your application to the production servers, it will become the default version
, and all user requests will be served using that version. If you upload a new version of your application with a new version identifier, then it will not serve any user requests until you go into the admin console and either mark it as the default version or enable traffic splitting (more detail about both are later in this post). If you use a version identifier that matches an already uploaded version, then it will overwrite the old version with the new one. If that version happens to be the default version, then it will start serving immediately.
Now we know a little about versions, we can go about using them to upgrade our version of WordPress we’re using.
Step 1: Uploading The New Version Of Your Site.
The first step to running a new version is actually uploading the updated version of your site to the production servers. The steps outlined below assume that you have setup your WordPress source code following the instructions on the Running WordPress page. We will get the latest version of WordPress and unpack it to the APPLICATION_DIRECTORY
directory as mentioned in that article, using the following steps.
$ wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip
$ unzip -o latest.zip -d APPLICATION_DIRECTORY
You should now run the site in your development environment to ensure that it behaves as you expect it to (once again, following the instructions on the Running WordPress page).
$ APP_ENGINE_SDK_PATH/dev_appserver.py --php_executable_path=PHP_CGI_EXECUTABLE_PATH APPLICATION_DIRECTORY
Once you’re satisfied that the site is running as you would expect in the development environment, you can upload it to the production servers. We’ll use the --version
flag of appcfg.py to upload the site with a new version number, that differs from the exiting version. In this example, we’ll use today’s date and the postfix “-352″ as the version identifier.
$ appcfg.py -R --version 20130624-352 update .
The appcfg tool will now upload a new version of your site. One interesting thing to note is that the tool will only upload files to the server that are different to existing files that you’ve previously uploaded in an existing version. This results in very fast uploads for new versions of large site that have only a small number of changes to the source.
You should see output similar to what’s shown below
10:53 AM Host: appengine.google.com
10:53 AM Application: gae-php-tips; version: 20130624-352 (was: wp-0501)
10:53 AM Starting update of app: gae-php-tips, version: 20130624-352
10:53 AM Getting current resource limits.
10:53 AM Scanning files on local disk.
...
10:53 AM Checking if deployment succeeded.
10:53 AM Deployment successful.
10:53 AM Checking if updated app version is serving.
10:53 AM Completed update of app: gae-php-tips, version: 20130624-352
10:53 AM Uploading cron entries.
You can now go to the admin console for you site and view the new version that was just uploaded.

As you can see from the screen shot, the new version has successfully uploaded, but our site is still serving live traffic from the existing version labelled “17062013”.
Step 2: Manually Testing The New Version
App Engine versions allow you to access any of the deployed versions of your site by prepending the correct version specifier to the site address. In our example here, I can access the new version of http://gae-php-tips.appspot.com/
by entering the url http://20130624-352-dot-gae-php-tips.appspot.com/
in the address bar of my browser.
Note: We use this feature to deploy phpMyAdmin side by side with WordPress in our application. You can see a version named “phpmyadmin” in the list of deployed versions.
Step 3: Traffic Splitting Live Traffic To The New Version.
Now that we’ve deployed the new version of the site and manually tested that it serves as we expect, we can now start sending it live traffic. We have two options for serving traffic from this applcation.
- Make the new version the default version so that it handles all requests for the site.
- Use traffic splitting to send a percentage of users to the new version, to assess its stability before making it the default.
In this example, we’ll use traffic splitting to ensure that the new version of the site is stable before making it the default. To get started, click on the traffic splitting link on the versions page for your site. It will present the option to enable traffic splitting which will look like this.

From here click on the “Add Traffic Split…” button to configure traffic splitting. You will be asked to select the version that you want to split traffic to, and the percentage of traffic to split to the new version. Select the version that you just uploaded and the amount of traffic you want to send it (in my case, 25%).

Once you click on OK
App Engine will enable traffic splitting using the configuration that you’ve supplied. A reminder that traffic splitting is enabled will be shown on your admin console page for the site.

Your site is now serving a percentage of user requests with the new version of your site.
Step 4: Monitoring The New Version.
You can use the application logs to verify that the new version of your site is serving without errors. At the top of the logs page it allows you to view logs for a specific version. Using this, you can quickly drill down if the new version of your site is serving correctly.

You can see that these are the logs for the versions 17062013
which is currently serving 75% of the traffic for the site, while below are the logs for a new version 20130624-352
which is serving 25% of the traffic for our site.

Step 5: Making The New Version The Default
Once we’re satisfied that the new version of the site is performing correctly, we can switch it over to be the default for all user requests.To do this, we go back to the versions page in the admin console for our site. By selecting the radio button next to the new version and pressing Make Default
, the traffic split will be dropped and the new version will handle all live traffic.

You could also roll back to the older version of the app by removing the traffic split, or change the split percentage if you want to gradually increase the traffic load on the new version over time.
Notes About Running Multiple Versions
One important thing to consider when running multiple versions of your site, is that each different version of your site requires at least one running instance to serve from. These instances are charged independently, so that if you are traffic splitting on a free site you are likely to run out of the free quota during one 24 hour billing period.
Another thing to consider when running multiple versions is that all versions share the same database. If there is a schema change to the database for a new version, the older versions may not function correctly. In our example we upgraded from WordPress 3.5.1 to 3.5.2 which uses the same schema so we could serve both versions from the same database. If you want to run multiple versions that have different schemas then you use separate databases for each version. You could use the backup and restore functionality of CloudSQL create a copy of your live database for the new version.
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