App Engine Project Cleanup

When Managed VMs were first announced it was the first App Engine runtime to support Nodejs. So, the examples in this post use Nodejs. However, the ideas and commands apply to all the runtimes.

Prerequisites
You will need a GCP project with an App Engine app.

This will deploy a Nodejs application. Test that your application is accessible.

If we make a change to the app.js file containing the code and then deploy the
app again with the basic gcloud app deploy command then a second version will automatically be created.

For example, changing the line

to

and executing

will automatically create a new version of the app. The old version will be kept but will no longer receive traffic. That is convenient in the short term but can lead to the accumulation of many versions.

To check the default page served by the app execute the command

To get a list of services:

To describe a service

Checking Traffic
You can check if your app is receiving traffic by reading the logs with the command

Cleaning Up
To delete the earlier version of the app not serving any traffic execute

Check that the version has been deleted

Then execute the following command to deploy a new version but not send traffic to it

Notice that this variant of the command uses the version flag to give the
version a name. It also uses the quiet flag to avoid gcloud asking questions that require a human response, which can be convenient for automation.

Check that the version is deployed but not receiving traffic

Notice that the traffic split for the new version is 0.00, so it is serving but no traffic is being sent to it. We can test a specific version by including the version name in the URL. For example,

You probably want to more extensive testing than that. You can browse to a
specific version of the app with the command

If you are promoting an App Engine Standard version then you can migrate
traffic to the version with the command

However, for Flex we need to use the gcloud app deploy command and now promote the version.

It is ok to redeploy the same version multiple times. Check that it is now the default version

Note that the traffic split for the new version is now 1.00. Then delete the old version

Check that it is stopped

If needed, you can start it again

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