BeautifulSoup, GoogleAppengineLauncher and Snow Leopard

Using BeautifulSoup has turned out very useful ... However, once everything worked fine from Mac (Snow Leopard) "command line" for the Python script, it was more tricky to get it into the GAE SDK (the GoogleAppengineLauncher).

First of all, to use BeautifulSoup, just download the file "BeautifulSoup.py" from the developer, and drop it in the main directory of the GAE app your are developing. Even if your script that is using BeautifulSoup is in a sub directory, the soup needs to go in the main dir (although I suspect some wizard could have a nice way around that...).

Now, the problem is:

: No module named _ctypes
      args = ('No module named _ctypes',)
      message = 'No module named _ctypes'

...and it turns out the GAE SDK works only with Python 2.5 and not 2.6 which Snow Leopard uses.

You can see in both the GoogleAppEnginerLauncher's Log windows that 2.6 is being used, and possibly at the top of yor browser window that throws out the error messages.

Here is a nice workaround: http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=2122#c3 . Just go into the GoogleAppEnginerLauncher's preferences and set your Python path to:

/usr/bin/python2.5

You can double check that 2.5 is also installed - it was on my Snow Leopard...

Note this is slightly different from the path proposed by the Preferences window.

Off we go...