Configuring Eclipse for the App Engine

Checkout this step by step tutorial on installing app engine support on eclipse, after you install the app engine. Note that you have to install PyDev. The "Installing Pydev for Eclipse" section works for win/mac/linux. The "starting your first project" section will be different on a mac/linux.

On the mac, when you try to create a new "Pydev google app engine project" it will ask you for the google_appengine directory. This directory is buried under GoogleAppEngineLauncher.app so eclipse can't see it. What I ended up doing was going to the terminal and typing (this creates a symbolic link on the filesystem) :

ln -s /Users/jmvidal/Desktop/GoogleAppEngineLauncher.app/Contents/Resources/GoogleAppEngine-default.bundle/Contents/Resources/google_appengine google_appengine

then telling eclipse that the app engine directory is at /Users/jmvidal/google_appengine.

Finally, while you are installing eclipse plugins, you will also want to install the eclipse web tools platform (WTP) which you can do via Help->install new software and then using this repository (it might already be under your "Available Software Sites" link, depending on which version of Eclipse you installed). WTP provides eclipse with fancy editors for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which you will need in a couple of weeks.