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Google App Engine SDK bug?

I encountered a problem with the Google App Engine development server today and it seemed like a good thing to blog about how I solved it.

I got this error when posting binary data to my locally running development server (GAE 1.8.9 and Python 2.7.2):

ProgrammingError(‘You must not use 8-bit bytestrings unless you use a text_factory that can interpret 8-bit bytestrings (like text_factory = str). It is highly recommended that you instead just switch your application to Unicode strings.

I think the problem was due to some limitation in Sqlite but I didn’t dig very deep into it. So how to fix it?

I was able to get around the error by simply patching a source file that comes with the Google AppEngine SDK. In the file logservice_stub.py you can insert the following line:

(This file is usually located at /usr/local/google_appengine/google/appengine/api/logservice/logservice_stub.py)

Hope this helps!