SVN commands you must know as an Test Automation Engineer

In the course of automation and continuous integration , you will someday come across a stage where you have to perform svn operations . And obviously, using command line (forget fancy UIs to do your business) using command line. And then you will have to start digging in,  which will take a substantial amount time ...believe me.

How to use argparse module to create command line tools with Python?

Its been decades I have been using sys.argv for simple tasks related to argument parsing. But the thing is, sometimes we don't realize how good something is unless we use it . Like the argparse module.

The official document got me totally confused. So I wrote my own tutorial. Let's get started.

Exploring COLLECTIONS module from Python

The 'collections' module has some interesting methods that give us an edge over generic inbuilt tools . I want to explore them here today and show how you can use them .

namedtuple

Tuples are represented as (item1, item2, item2, ...) . They support indexing and one of the ways to use them is :

>>> from collections import namedtuple
>>> Car = namedtuple('Car','Price Mileage Colour Class')
>>> xyz = Car(Price = 100000, Mileage = 30, Colour = 'Cyan', Class = 'Y')
>>> print xyz
Car(Price=100000, Mileage=30, Colour='Cyan', Class='Y')
>>> print xyz.Class
Y

They turn tuples into convenient containers for simple tasks. With namedtuples, you don’t have to use integer indices for accessing members of a tuple.

How to import and use a font in your website ?

Most people like to use the default available list of fonts . But what if we liked some other font and we want to use it our own website .

There are free downloadable fonts on the web. When you download a zip of it , you generally would receive files of the format 'ttf', 'otf' etc. You can visit the site https://www.fontsquirrel.com and convert them into a format 'woff' .

How to use Docker with Python projects

Docker is the modern way to share ready made machines , so other can use it without the usual hassles of configuration and environment setup. I wanted to try it myself first hand, to see what the fuss is about.  I want to share what I found, so you start your project right now.

Before we start, for the absolute beginners who ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA about DOCKER, let me try to explain what it is:

It is a CONTAINER which CONTAINS ALL that you NEED to run your project. 

Dockers are the new generation Virtual Machines which totally remove the need to install another files on a system just to run or test something . They are just CONTAINERS with all the things necessary for our app to work. That's it .

Testing GET and POST calls using Flask

I was trying out Flask. In the process, I made a website that behaves like a server. It can help you test GET and POST calls.

It goes like this .

from flask import Flask, request
    app = Flask(__name__)
    
    @app.route('/method', methods=['GET', 'POST'])
    @app.route('/method/<wish>', methods=['GET', 'POST'])
    def method_used(wish=None):
        if request.method == 'GET':
            if wish:
                if wish in dir(request):
                    ans = None
                    s = "ans = str(request.%s)" % wish
                    exec s
                    return ans
                else:
                    return 'This wish is not available. The following are the available wishes: %s' % [method for method in dir(request) if '_' not in method]
            else:
                return 'This is just a GET method'
        else:
            return "You are using POST"

Why should we use Class in Python ?

Lots of people ask me, why should they use classes at all ? Well. I think its about control, and ease . It solves the headache of data sharing and accessibility. I am going to show you an example , which hopefully proves that classes and fundamentals like inheritance  are brilliant. Example: I have  two classes in the below program. Person and Manager . Manager has inherited the Person class (because he is a person too....almost (lol)) .