To create your first Google App Engine application , choose a name and an identifier for your application.

Make sure your applications identifier doesn’t contain the words “app engine” cause you’ll get an “This application id is unavailable.” error.

After registering your applications name , go to dashboard>versions to add a domain name for your application.

You’ll have to sign up for Google Apps and prove you own the domain you want to add.

Click the Sign up for Gooogle Apps link on the right. On the new screen , add your domain, in my case is demo.appenginebase.com and complete the sign up process by filling in the required info.

After registration you’ll be redirected to a screen where you can enable/disable google services for this domain. In my case i only enabled the email service and the app engine service.

To verify the ownership of the domain, 2 methods are provided. By adding a CNAME or by uploading a file with a unique string on your server.

Login to your domains control panel, and add a subdomain , demo.appengine.com. After your subdomain was created upload a html file containing the google unique string and name it googlehostedservice.html.

Navigate to your subdomain http://demo.appengine.com/googlehostedservice.html. If you can see the file go back to the google app engine page and click verify. If you can’t see it make sure your document has the right permissions.

After verifying that you own the domain you have to set up your domain or subdomain to point to google.

Go back to the Version tab on the google app engine page and add the domain or subdomain you want to use.

In my case demo.appenginebase.com

Setting up your subdomain to point to google is done by adding a CNAME in your DNS settings.

Go to your DNS settings admin for the domain and add a CNAME field , set the alias to demo.appenginebase.com and the destination to ghs.google.com.

To set up an entire domain, first set up the A record to point to google and add the CNAME field after.

Set the A record(host) to domain.com. , and add the following IPs 216.239.38.21 , 216.239.36.21 , 216.239.34.21, 216.239.32.21

To set up your email to point to google, in the mx records fields set host to appenginebase.com. and add the following hosts : ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. priority 10, ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. priority 20 , ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. priority 20

I’m using EasyDns for my DNS settings so here is a screen shot with the settings in place for setting up a domain with google app engine.

I just received a beta invite to Google’s App Engine and before starting the development of my first google app engine application i set up this blog to serve as a resource for all of you who want to learn in the same time as me.

Thanks, and check back soon for the first step: Setting up the domain.