Question

In my search for a good social login package for App Engine, I am giving gae-boilerplate a try. But I find there is no documentation except the readme file, which I think it is not enough at all.

I have many questions, among them:

• Should the boilerplate be used as a library or download and modify as needed?
• How should the boilerplate be updated?
• What does each model do?
• Where should my templates go?
• Should I have a different routes file?
• Should I derive my Handlers from BaseHandler?
• In general, what things should I implement in my pages? For example, I found out that I have to include a csrf_token in all POST requests. It would have been nice to know this in advance, and the many other things that I’m having to find out along the way, and which I implement without being sure if I’m supposed to be doing that.
• And some more…

My biggest problem is that Social login is not working, and I feel this boilerplate is a big monster with which I don’t know where to start. To make things worse, it is hard to debug social auth from any machine that is not the production one. Thats why I’m desperately looking for some docs.

I have not found anything in SO, and I guess there must be more people in my situation. So, any pointers to documentation that could help to understand gae-boilerplate a little bit better would be very appreciated.

EDIT: I switched to gae-boilerplate in a site that I had previously working. Maybe most of my problems come from the way that I have tried to integrate gae-boilerplate and my existing site. As a result I have tried to treat gae-boilerplate as a library, and keep my own templates, handlers, static files and such.

Thank you guys!

EDIT 2: After trying other options, I have to say that I am very happy with gae-simpleauth. It works really well, and Alex’s support is superb.

Answer 1

I will try to answer most of your questions below:

• Should the boilerplate be used as a library or download and modify as needed?
  • You can modify it as needed based on your specific requirements.
• How should the boilerplate be updated?
  • What do you mean?
• What does each model do?
  • User and SocialUser are pretty self explanatory. LogVisit and LogEmail are used for auditing purposes.
• Where should my templates go?
  • In the templates directory
• Should I have a different routes file?
  • No, you can use the existing file for all your routes.
• Should I derive my Handlers from BaseHandler?
  • It’t not mandatory but I would recommend to do so. BaseHandler is very handy and provides a lot of good stuff.
• In general, what things should I implement in my pages?
  • What exactly do you mean?

In general, you can use gae-boilerplate as a reference on top of which you will built your own project. Study the code step by step, try to figure out what is the purpose of each file and library used and how they work together. This way you will gain good knowledge of a lot of things like jinja templating, oauth2, etc.

Hope this helps.