TL;DR: Instead of && use ; after a command that might have errors.

My main project at work has a nice Make command for getting a new truncated version of our main database. Unfortunately, I can never remember the exact command, and it requires a second command (pg_restore) to update my local database. It occurred to me that an alias would go a long way to making this easier for me.

alias new_db="make get_new_db && pg_restore other_args"

This was already a big win because now I don't have to wait for the database to download before executing the pg_restore command, which also takes some time. Now I can call the alias and let it run until I have an updated database with no more input.

Recently, I also realized that we have a nice management command that resets all local passwords, so you can set a simpler password locally than for production, so I tried to add that to my alias:

alias new_db="make get_new_db && pg_restore other_args && python manage.py set_pw"

Executing new_db still works, but the final command doesn't run. I failed to find a solution with some basic searching, but a coworker pointed out that the pg_restore command usually has some (expected) errors. The && operator expects the previous command to have an exit code of 0, which this does not. In order to run a command after command with errors, you can use the ; operator so that command becomes:

alias new_db="make get_new_db && pg_restore other_args ; python manage.py set_pw"

And now all of it runs!

TIL: Docker Commands

Published: Thu 25 April 2024
By Andrew Mshar

In TIL.

tags: til python docker aws

I set up my main project at work to utilize LocalStack this week. I wasn't able to get it working using a virtual environment with Python, but another project at work has it set up through Docker. A coworker that is much more familiar with Docker than I am helped …
[TIL] Using Fixtures with pytest `parametrize`

Published: Thu 08 February 2024
By Andrew Mshar

In Django.

tags: python django testing til

For longer than I care to admit, I was running my end to end tests in only Firefox. I thought it would be trivial to add a fixture to have my tests run using multiple browsers. Unfortunately, there isn't an easy way in pytest to use fixtures as parametrized values …

[TIL] Mocking Chained Calls

At work last week, I was asked to write tests for code that reaches out to Twilio's verify service. Here is what that code looks like (from the Twilio docs):

client = Client(account_sid, auth_token)

verification = client.verify \
                     .v2 \
                     .services('VAXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX') \
                     .verifications \
                     .create(to='+15017122661', channel='sms')

I was able to …

[TIL] Django Admin Permissions, etc.

Published: Fri 03 March 2023
By Andrew Mshar

In Django.

tags: django til

So far in my main project (more on that to come), the only users of the admin have been myself and my cofounder, so I've made us both superusers. Recently, I had a request to allow an instructor to view and update data from their own courses. This would require …