App Engine SDK doesn't play nice with Python virtual environments but there is a way to work around it. When you deploy an app to GAE the deploy script will resolve any symbolic links inside your project directory and upload their actual targets. This script will create those links for all packages you have installed in your virtualenv.
Read more at http://ze.phyr.us/appengine-virtualenv/
pip install git+https://github.com/ze-phyr-us/linkenv.git
To create package symlinks in directory gaenv (for example), go to the root of your project and run
linkenv env/lib/python2.7/site-packages gaenv
The first argument indicates where your virtualenv packages are installed. After the script finishes you need to make sure that gaenv is in your import path. One easy way is to add these lines to your appengine_config.py:
import os, sys
sys.path.insert(0, os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'gaenv'))
After this you will be able to use the virtualenv in your local environment, as well as deploy the packages to production servers.
Instead of symlinking the packages you can outright copy them. You need to do this if you're on Windows as this script only supports symbolic links but not junctions.
linkenv --copy env/lib/python2.7/site-packages gaenv
- Follow paths in
.egg-linkfiles as well.