I just downloaded the Google plugin for Eclipse and have begun to play around with it. One of the coolest, and scariest, features I’ve found so far is the ability to deploy a web app straight to Google App Engine (the “production” environment) right from inside Eclipse (your “local/dev” environment).
This is perfectly fine for small projects with a small number of developers who are all core contributors and “owners”, but the minute you introduce this power to even a moderately-large development team it becomes a double-edge sword.
The fact that a junior developer could possibly blow-out production with a buggy, completely disfunctional version of the app that he/she broke locally terrifies me!
Is there anyway to restrict which user(s)/group(s) can make use of this deployment capability? If not, are there any workarounds or remedies? I can’t imagine I’m the first person to be alarmed by this! Thanks in advance!
Yes. Go to the AppEngine web interface and click on your app. In the left navigation panel, click on Administration -> Permissions and set the junior developers to “viewer”, not “developer” or “owner”.