DEVELOP.rst

Development Guide

This is a guide for developers who would like to contribute to this project.

GitHub Workflow

If you're interested in contributing to pgcli, first of all my heart felt thanks. Fork the project in github. Then clone your fork into your computer (git clone <url-for-your-fork>). Make the changes and create the commits in your local machine. Then push those changes to your fork. Then click on the pull request icon on github and create a new pull request. Add a description about the change and send it along. I promise to review the pull request in a reasonable window of time and get back to you.

In order to keep your fork up to date with any changes from mainline, add a new git remote to your local copy called 'upstream' and point it to the main pgcli repo.

$ git remote add upstream [email protected]:dbcli/pgcli.git

Once the 'upstream' end point is added you can then periodically do a git pull upstream master to update your local copy and then do a git push origin master to keep your own fork up to date.

Local Setup

The installation instructions in the README file are intended for users of pgcli. If you're developing pgcli, you'll need to install it in a slightly different way so you can see the effects of your changes right away without having to go through the install cycle everytime you change the code.

It is highly recommended to use virtualenv for development. If you don't know what a virtualenv is, this guide will help you get started.

Create a virtualenv (let's call it pgcli-dev). Activate it:

source ./pgcli-dev/bin/activate

Once the virtualenv is activated, cd into the local clone of pgcli folder and install pgcli using pip as follows:

$ pip install --editable .

or

$ pip install -e .

This will install the necessary dependencies as well as install pgcli from the working folder into the virtualenv. By installing it using pip install -e we've linked the pgcli installation with the working copy. So any changes made to the code is immediately available in the installed version of pgcli. This makes it easy to change something in the code, launch pgcli and check the effects of your change.

Adding PostgreSQL Special (Meta) Commands

If you want to work on adding new meta-commands (such as dp, ds, dy), you'll be changing the code of packages/pgspecial.py. Search for the dictionary called CASE_SENSITIVE_COMMANDS. The special command us used as the dictionary key, and the value is a tuple.

The first item in the tuple is either a string (sql statement) or a function. The second item in the tuple is a list of strings which is the documentation for that special command. The list will have two items, the first item is the command itself with possible options and the second item is the plain english description of that command.

For example, l is a meta-command that lists all the databases. The way you can see the SQL statement issued by PostgreSQL when this command is executed is to launch psql -E and entering l.

That will print the results and also print the sql statement that was executed to produce that result. In most cases it's a single sql statement, but sometimes it's a series of sql statements that feed the results to each other to get to the final result.

Building RPM and DEB packages

You will need Vagrant 1.7.2 or higher. In the project root there is a Vagrantfile that is setup to do multi-vm provisioning. If you're setting things up for the first time, then do:

$ version=x.y.z vagrant up debian
$ version=x.y.z vagrant up centos

If you already have those VMs setup and you're merely creating a new version of DEB or RPM package, then you can do:

$ version=x.y.z vagrant provision

That will create a .deb file and a .rpm file.

The deb package can be installed as follows:

$ sudo dpkg -i pgcli*.deb   # if dependencies are available.

or

$ sudo apt-get install -f pgcli*.deb  # if dependencies are not available.

The rpm package can be installed as follows:

$ sudo yum install pgcli*.rpm

Running the integration tests

Integration tests use `behave package http://pythonhosted.org/behave/`_ and pytest. Configuration settings for this package are provided via behave.ini file in root directory.

The database user (pg_test_user = postgres in .ini file) has to have permissions to create and drop test database. Default user is postgres at localhost, without the password (authentication mode trust).

First, install the requirements for testing:

$ pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

After that, tests can be run with:

$ cd tests
$ behave
$ py.test

To see stdout/stderr, use the following command:

$ behave --no-capture