iPython is an awesome extended Python shell that gives you goodies like tab completion for instances, history tracing (so you can easily copy interactive sessions as doctests), etc. And, if you install it, your Django project on Google App Engine will automatically start using it instead of the regular python shell when you use ./manage.py shell.

To install iPython on OS X Tiger (yes, my Leopard discs are still safely in their box since I downgraded and I don't see any reason to bring them back out yet), I followed the following steps:

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Developer emptor: I just lost a couple of hours to this: make sure you disable the Google App Engine doctest import in your apps when you're done testing a module lest you encounter _weird_ errors. I started having the login URL returned by users.create_login_url() being returned incorrectly when I forgot to remove the doctest import. It started forwarding to https://www.google.com/accounts/Login?continue=. Check out my forum post on it here.

I love Python's doctests. Basically, you test out your functions in the interactive shell and copy the results into the comments for a function. That's it! So simple.

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