Setting up your Google Cloud project for App Engine

Enabling billing

To deploy your apps, you must enable billing. Your account will not be charged if you stay within your free quota. If your application needs resources that exceed the free quota, you will be charged for the additional usage.

If you have a billing account when you create a Google Cloud project, then billing is automatically enabled on that project.

To enable billing on a Google Cloud project:

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Billing page:

   Go to Billing

2. Select or create a Google Cloud project.

3. Depending on if a billing account exists or if the selected Google Cloud project is associated with an account, the Billing page displays one of the following:

   • If billing is already enabled for the selected Google Cloud project, then the details about the billing account are listed.

   • If no billing account exists, you are prompted to create a billing account and associate it with the selected Google Cloud project.

   • If a billing account exists, you are prompted to enable billing if the selected Google Cloud project is not already associated with a billing account. You can also click Cancel and then click Create account to create and associate a new billing account.

After you enable billing, there is no limit to the amount that you might be charged. To gain more control over your application's costs, you can create a budget and set alerts.

Managing billing

Use the Billing page to manage your billing accounts:

1. Go to the Billing page in the Google Cloud console:

   Go to Billing

2. Select the account that you want to manage and then navigate to the corresponding page to perform the following management tasks:

   • See an overview of your billing account, make payments, and add billing account administrators from the Overview page.
   • Create budgets and alerts on the Budgets & alerts page.
   • View your transaction history and download invoices from the Transactions page.
   • Export your billing data to a BigQuery Dataset from the Billing export page.
   • Configure your payment account and contacts on the Payment settings page.
   • Set the method of payment on the Payment method page.

For more information about billing, see the Pricing page.

Creating budgets and setting alerts

You can create a budget for a Google Cloud project to avoid surprises on your bill and monitor all of your Google Cloud charges from one place. With a budget, you can create alerts that send emails to your billing administrators when charges exceed a certain amount.

To create a budget and set alerts in a Google Cloud project:

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Billing page:

   Go to Billing

2. Click the billing account for which you want to create a budget.

3. Click Budgets & alerts and then Create budget to begin creating a budget for your Google Cloud project.

4. Define your budget in the Set budget section and then specify the percentages for which you want to receive email alerts in the following Set budget alerts section.

5. Click Save to set the budget and enable alerts for your Google Cloud project. If you have multiple Google Cloud projects, you must individually set budgets and alerts in each project.

Setting project ID for a project

You can specify the project ID in a few different ways:

• By using gcloud init when you install the Google Cloud CLI. To view the default project ID of the gcloud CLI, run gcloud config list.
• By using the gcloud config set project [YOUR_PROJECT_ID] command to set the default project ID of the gcloud CLI.
• By using the --project flag when you deploy your app, for example: gcloud app deploy --project [YOUR_PROJECT_ID]

If you use the Java runtime, you can specify the project ID during deployment using the Google Cloud plugin for IntelliJ.

Disabling an application

Disable an App Engine application to stop your app from running instances and serving requests. No data loss will occur when you disable your app, nor will any configuration settings change. Simply re-enable your App Engine application to startup instances and continue serving the traffic to your app.

Your app's resources in both the standard and flexible environment are disabled and therefore, won't incur charges. However, billing charges can still occur for the other services in your Google Cloud project, for example you can still incur storage charges for your stored data.

If your app is actively processing a request, it will continue to complete that task and can take up to an hour before your app is completely disabled.

To disable an App Engine application:

1. Go to the Application settings page:

   Go to Application settings

2. Click Disable application and then follow the prompts.

When you want your app to continue serving requests, enable the App Engine application by returning to the same Application settings page and then clicking Enable application.

Disabling your application stops all serving requests, but your data and state are retained. You will still be billed for applicable charges already incurred or charges for other services running in your project, such as Cloud SQL. To release all the resources used within the project, shut down your project.

Shutting down a project

You can disable billing and release all the Google Cloud resources that are being used in your Google Cloud project by shutting down that project.

gcloud projects delete PROJECT_ID