Capstone project: Improve our testing harness

[stevendiaz]

Overview

note: although this issue is on my (stevendiaz) fork of the texaslan.org repo, you'll be making your changes on the official texaslan.org repo

Required concepts

Before starting, consider the following questions. If you can't immediately answer them, thats ok! This serves as an overview of the concepts you'll need or learn to finish this issue. If you can answer them, then you'll probably have an easier time solving this issue. I recommend searching tutorials on YouTube for anything you're unfamiliar with.

1. What are unit tests? What is test driven development?
2. What are Docker containers? Why are docker containers helpful?

The task

Currently, our testing framework does not run out of the box, if at all. We currently use a tool called py.test to run our tests.

The first step is to fix the tests. Once you can get the tests running, getting them running on a Docker container should be easier.

The second step is to make a Makefile that builds the Docker container and attaches to it. This will require some research into the Docker command line tool and how to write Makefiles. I can help you with both of these. Luckily, there is an almost 1:1 example right here

Then, we can boil the testing down to just two steps.
$ make (Create the docker container, attach to it)
$ py.test (Run the tests in the docker container, have them pass)

Why you should pick this issue as your capstone

1. I'll teach you how to pitch this to recruiters
2. Brief introduction to useful concepts like Docker, Make, and testing
3. Learn Open Source concepts like how to make pull requests and contribute to open source code
4. Doesn't require prior python knowledge

Potential follow up

Once consistent testing has been established, this serves as a great segue into continuous integration. Ideally, all of the pull requests opened against this repo will make a build and run unit tests to ensure.

Tools used

1. Make
2. Docker
3. Py.test

[cyborg-nomade]

is this still going on? i would probably demand some guidance, but i think i could help.