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# The Development Environment

You develop and upload Go applications for Google App Engine using the App Engine Go software development kit (SDK).

The Go SDK includes a web server application that simulates the App Engine environment, including a local version of the datastore, Google Accounts, and the ability to fetch URLs and send email directly from your computer using the App Engine APIs. The Go SDK uses slightly modified versions of the development tools from the Python SDK, and will run on any Intel-based Mac OS X or Linux computer with Python 2.5.

If necessary, download and install Python 2.5 for your platform from the Python web site. Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard users already have Python 2.5 installed. Later versions of OS X also include newer versions of Python; if you have issues with the Python tools, please ensure you have Python 2.5 installed.

Download the App Engine SDK. Follow the instructions on the download page to install the SDK on your computer.

For this tutorial, you will use two commands from the SDK:

- dev_appserver.py, the development web server
- appcfg.py, for uploading your app to App Engine

You can find these commands in the `google_appengine` directory of the zip archive.

To simplify development and deployment, consider adding this directory to your `PATH` environment variable. This can be done by adding the following line to your `$HOME/.profile`, `$HOME/.bashrc`, or equivalent:

    export PATH=/path/to/google_appengine:$PATH

## Next...

The local development environment lets you develop and test complete App Engine applications before showing them to the world. Let's write some code.

Continue to Hello, World!