Following up on my last year's question on documentation, I now want to get started and try out Python-based Sphinx for putting together the developer documentation for a PHP CMS I've been working on.

Instead of setting up Python locally on my workstation, I would like to run it on a publicly accessible web server from the start. All the web hosting packages I have access to run on the LAMP stack, and I'm reluctant to buy Python-based hosting. I am very interested in the Google App Engine, the free quotas they provide will do for me a hundred times over, and even if not, their pricing looks very reasonable.

Now I have zero knowledge of Python - getting Sphinx to work would be my first contact with it - and very little time. As far as I understand, the platform and python libraries the App Engine provides are very compatible to a standard Python library but not identical.

So my question is:

• Can Sphinx run on App Engine at all?

• Is installing Sphinx on the App Engine as straightforward as if I would install it on top of a normal Python installation? Or will the App Engine's environment require tweaking of the source code that I can't perform in reasonable time with my current level of Python?

• Should I be installing Sphinx on a local server and a "normal" Python stack instead first?

• Does anybody know any helpful How-to's, tutorials or other resources for this?