Developer Guide

giftless is based on Flask, with the following additional libraries:

  • Flask Classful for simplifying API endpoint implementation with Flask

  • Marshmallow for input / output serialization and validation

  • figcan for configuration handling

You must have Python 3.7 and newer set up to run or develop giftless.

Code Style

We use the following tools and standards to write giftless code:

  • flake8 to check your Python code for PEP8 compliance

  • import statements are checked by isort and should be organized accordingly

  • Type checking is done using mypy

Maximum line length is set to 120 characters.

Setting up a Virtual Environment

You should develop giftless in a virtual environment. We use pip-tools to manage both development and runtime dependencies.

The following snippet is an example of how to set up your virtual environment for development:

$ python3 -m venv .venv
$ . .venv/bin/activate

(.venv) $ pip install -r dev-requirements.txt
(.venv) $ pip-sync dev-requirements.txt requirements.txt

Running the tests

Once in a virtual environment, you can simply run make test to run all tests and code style checks:

$ make test

We use pytest for Python unit testing.

In addition, simple functions can specify some doctest style tests in the function docstring. These tests will be tested automatically when unit tests are executed.

Building a Docker image

Simply run make docker to build a uWSGI wrapped Docker image for Giftless. The image will be named datopian/giftless:latest by default. You can change it, for example:

$ make docker DOCKER_REPO=mycompany DOCKER_IMAGE_TAG=1.2.3

Will build a Docekr image tagged mycompany/giftless:1.2.3.