Ok, maybe I am late at the party, and some people will think what I am writing here is obvious, but nevermind. ;)
There's a trend these days on Github-based online services. That is -- point me your Github repo and I'll do something with it everytime you push a change.
Notification hooks have existed for years now, and a lot of teams have their own Jenkins CI (we do at Mozilla), or their checkins mailing list. But the thing is : what's the point to maintain your own stuff anymore when there's a service for it you can hook in a few minutes.
For a Python project there are two absolutely awesome services:
- ReadTheDocs -- creates a website out of your project Sphinx docs, exactly like what we've set with http://packages.python.org but it's all automatically done for you on every commit. win
- Travis-CI -- run your tests on every change. Sends mail on failure. Again, nothing's new here, but as a developer, the only thing you have to do is to add a YAML file in your repo. win
Travis does not replace functional tests or tests you want to run on a specific infrastructure. But for day-to-day usage it's perfect.
In fact, there are more and more people that have standardized their README page that appears at PyPI with those two tools.
For example, look at Circus -- http://pypi.python.org/pypi/circus
It displays the Travis build status directly on PyPI, and provides a link to Read the docs.
Out of my head here are some services I'd love to enable from my Github admin panel:
- A Coverage Dashboard like this one -- http://nedbatchelder.com/code/coverage/sample_html/
- A similar Dashboard but with profiling info, using http://www.hexacosa.net/project/pyprof2html/
- A Funkload Trending Dashboard. Read about this here: http://ziade.org/2011/06/10/continuous-load-testing-wint-funkload
The first and second ones are simple to produce - all it takes is a call to the script that generates the HTML report. It needs to run in some VM though.
Ah. mm wait. Maybe the ReadTheDocs project could add support to these, or maybe I can try to sneak in those dashboards as Sphinx extensions...
The last one is harder because it involves some thoughts on the load testing architecture and well, it won't tell you if your application is slow on your hardware -- it will just detect that your web service got suddenly slower after that commit.
There are hundreds of services on Github already -- curious to know which ones Python folk use.