Category Archives: OS

Find out executable resolve path

When we run a command like python --version from CLI, Windows looks for python.exe from the “Environment Variables”, specifically checks the PATH variable. If you want to know from where the executable got resolved, you can use a handy utility called where.exe:

where python

Of course, we can where the where🙂

where where

Happy coding!

Basic testing in Python using Pytest

Goal of this post is to write a short test using Pytest.

Tool/prerequisites we are going to use: Visual Studio Code (or any file editor), python 3+.

GitRepo is available here.

Testing is and will be essential when coding. To make our life easier, developers created many frameworks and helpers to quickly achieve high code coverage. One well know library for Python is Pytest, which we are going to use in this article.

Start a new project/folder using your favorite editor and create a requirements file for PIP, we are going to use test_requirements.txt. Add our only dependency:

pytest

Install our dependency with the following command (running from the folder where the test_requirements.txt is):

pip install -r test_requirements.txt

Now we can add our code file with the name basic_calculator.py:

def sum(numberOne: int, numberTwo: int):
    return numberOne + numberTwo

It doesn’t do anything fancy, just sums two number.

Now comes the test. Add a new file called test_basic_calculator.py:

import basic_calculator

class TestHandler:
    def test_sum_one(self):
        sum = basic_calculator.sum(2,3)
        assert sum == 5

    def test_sum_two(self):
        sum = basic_calculator.sum(66,55)
        assert sum == 121

We are done with coding, let’s run our test (give the following command from folder):

python -m pytest

The result should be something similar to this:

What happened here? We asked python to run the module called pytest in the working folder. Pytest then searches for filenames which start with “test_” and looks for classes starting with “Test” containing function names starting with “test”.

Narrowing down the test scope

We might want to run test only on one file, to do so we can specify it by name:

python -m pytest ./test_basic_calculator.py

There are further options as well

Run only one class in a file:

python -m pytest ./test_basic_calculator.py -k "Test_Handler"

or

python -m pytest ./test_basic_calculator.py::Test_Handler

If you only want to run one test in a class:

python -m pytest ./test_basic_calculator.py -k "Test_Handler and test_sum_one"

or

python -m pytest ./test_basic_calculator.py::Test_Handler::test_sum_one

Happy coding!

Change between local AWS profile

We can store AWS profile data in a configuration file under C:\Users\{userName}\.aws\credentials like following:

[profile1]
aws_access_key_id=x
aws_secret_access_key=y
region=eu-west-1
aws_region=eu-west-1

[profil2]
aws_access_key_id=xy
aws_secret_access_key=zk
region=eu-west-1
aws_region=eu-west-1

We can easily rotate between them using the following command:

setx AWS_PROFILE profil1

To see which profile is currently selected use this code:

aws configure list

Note: As the above logic uses environment variable to save and read the currently selected profile, we need to restart applications to the update take effect.

How to run python code from Windows console

I am quite new to python programming but happy to use it for quick test cases like API calls or file operations. To run these scenarios I run them in different ways:

From file

One of the easiest way to call your script is to store them in a file and make python run them:

print('I am run from a file!')

content of run-me.py

Run it from command line:

python run-me.py

From inline command line

If you don’t want to save your code to a file, you can run it from inline:

python -c "print('I am from inline command line')"

From inline command line, multi line

Normally python code is segmented by new lines and indentation, but inline we can separate commands by semicolons: