Installation

Before you begin

This tutorial assumes that you have already followed the steps in Installing Pyramid, except do not create a virtual environment or install Pyramid. Thereby you will satisfy the following requirements.

Install cookiecutter

We will use a cookiecutter to create a Python package project from a Python package project template. See Cookiecutter Installation for instructions.

Generate a Pyramid project from a cookiecutter

We will create a Pyramid project in your home directory for Unix or at the root for Windows. It is assumed you know the path to where you installed cookiecutter. Issue the following commands and override the defaults in the prompts as follows.

On Unix

cd ~
cookiecutter gh:Pylons/pyramid-cookiecutter-starter --checkout 2.0-branch

On Windows

cd \
cookiecutter gh:Pylons/pyramid-cookiecutter-starter --checkout 2.0-branch

On all operating systems

If prompted for the first item, accept the default yes by hitting return.

You've downloaded ~/.cookiecutters/pyramid-cookiecutter-starter before.
Is it okay to delete and re-download it? [yes]: yes
project_name [Pyramid Scaffold]: myproj
repo_name [myproj]: tutorial
Select template_language:
1 - jinja2
2 - chameleon
3 - mako
Choose from 1, 2, 3 [1]: 2
Select backend:
1 - none
2 - sqlalchemy
3 - zodb
Choose from 1, 2, 3 [1]: 3

Change directory into your newly created project

On Unix

cd tutorial

On Windows

cd tutorial

Set and use a VENV environment variable

We will set the VENV environment variable to the absolute path of the virtual environment, and use it going forward.

On Unix

export VENV=~/tutorial

On Windows

set VENV=c:\tutorial

Create a virtual environment

On Unix

python3 -m venv $VENV

On Windows

python -m venv %VENV%

Upgrade packaging tools in the virtual environment

On Unix

$VENV/bin/pip install --upgrade pip setuptools

On Windows

%VENV%\Scripts\pip install --upgrade pip setuptools

Installing the project in development mode

In order to work on the project, you must "register" the project as a development egg in your workspace. We will install testing requirements at the same time. We do so with the following command.

On Unix

$VENV/bin/pip install -e ".[testing]"

On Windows

%VENV%\Scripts\pip install -e ".[testing]"

On all operating systems

The console will show pip checking for packages and installing missing packages. Success executing this command will show a line like the following:

Successfully installed BTrees-4.7.2 Chameleon-3.8.1 Mako-1.1.3 MarkupSafe-1.1.1 PasteDeploy-2.1.1 Pygments-2.7.3 WebTest-2.0.35 ZConfig-3.5.0 ZEO-5.2.2 ZODB-5.6.0 attrs-20.3.0 beautifulsoup4-4.9.3 cffi-1.14.4 coverage-5.3.1 hupper-1.10.2 iniconfig-1.1.1 packaging-20.8 persistent-4.6.4 plaster-1.0 plaster-pastedeploy-0.7 pluggy-0.13.1 py-1.10.0 pycparser-2.20 pyparsing-2.4.7 pyramid-1.10.5 pyramid-chameleon-0.3 pyramid-debugtoolbar-4.9 pyramid-mako-1.1.0 pyramid-retry-2.1.1 pyramid-tm-2.4 pyramid-zodbconn-0.8.1 pytest-6.2.1 pytest-cov-2.10.1 repoze.lru-0.7 six-1.15.0 soupsieve-2.1 toml-0.10.2 transaction-3.0.1 translationstring-1.4 tutorial venusian-3.0.0 waitress-1.4.4 webob-1.8.6 zc.lockfile-2.0 zdaemon-4.3 zodbpickle-2.0.0 zodburi-2.4.0 zope.deprecation-4.4.0 zope.interface-5.2.0

Testing requirements are defined in our project's setup.py file, in the tests_require and extras_require stanzas.

24tests_require = [
25    'WebTest',
26    'pytest',
27    'pytest-cov',
28]
48    extras_require={
49        'testing': tests_require,
50    },

Run the tests

After you've installed the project in development mode as well as the testing requirements, you may run the tests for the project. The following commands provide options to pytest that specify the module for which its tests shall be run, and to run pytest in quiet mode.

On Unix

$VENV/bin/pytest -q

On Windows

%VENV%\Scripts\pytest -q

For a successful test run, you should see output that ends like this:

....
4 passed in 0.49 seconds

Expose test coverage information

You can run the pytest command to see test coverage information. This runs the tests in the same way that pytest does, but provides additional coverage information, exposing which lines of your project are covered by the tests.

We've already installed the pytest-cov package into our virtual environment, so we can run the tests with coverage.

On Unix

$VENV/bin/pytest --cov --cov-report=term-missing

On Windows

%VENV%\Scripts\pytest --cov --cov-report=term-missing

If successful, you will see output something like this:

======================== test session starts =========================
platform darwin -- Python 3.9.0, pytest-6.2.1, py-1.10.0, pluggy-0.13.1
rootdir: /filepath/tutorial, inifile: pytest.ini, testpaths: tutorial
plugins: cov-2.10.1
collected 4 items

tests/test_functional.py ..                                     [ 50%]
tests/test_views.py ..                                          [100%]

---------- coverage: platform darwin, python 3.7.3-final-0 -----------
Name                          Stmts   Miss  Cover   Missing
-----------------------------------------------------------
tutorial/__init__.py             16      0   100%
tutorial/models/__init__.py       8      0   100%
tutorial/pshell.py                6      4    33%   5-12
tutorial/routes.py                2      0   100%
tutorial/views/__init__.py        0      0   100%
tutorial/views/default.py         4      0   100%
tutorial/views/notfound.py        4      0   100%
-----------------------------------------------------------
TOTAL                            40      4    90%

===================== 4 passed in 0.85 seconds =======================

Our package doesn't quite have 100% test coverage.

Test and coverage cookiecutter defaults

The Pyramid cookiecutter includes configuration defaults for pytest and test coverage. These configuration files are pytest.ini and .coveragerc, located at the root of your package.

pytest follows conventions for Python test discovery. The configuration defaults from the cookiecutter tell pytest where to find the module on which we want to run tests and coverage.

See also

See pytest's documentation for How to invoke pytest or invoke pytest -h to see its full set of options.

Start the application

Start the application. See What Is This pserve Thing for more information on pserve.

On Unix

$VENV/bin/pserve development.ini --reload

On Windows

%VENV%\Scripts\pserve development.ini --reload

Note

Your OS firewall, if any, may pop up a dialog asking for authorization to allow python to accept incoming network connections.

If successful, you will see something like this on your console:

Starting monitor for PID 65233.
Starting server in PID 65233.
Serving on http://localhost:6543
Serving on http://localhost:6543

This means the server is ready to accept requests.

Visit the application in a browser

In a browser, visit http://localhost:6543/. You will see the generated application's default page.

One thing you'll notice is the "debug toolbar" icon on right hand side of the page. You can read more about the purpose of the icon at The Debug Toolbar. It allows you to get information about your application while you develop.

Decisions the cookiecutter backend option zodb has made for you

When creating a project and selecting the backend option of zodb, the cookiecutter makes the following assumptions:

Note

Pyramid supports any persistent storage mechanism (e.g., an SQL database or filesystem files). It also supports an additional mechanism to map URLs to code (URL dispatch). However, for the purposes of this tutorial, we will only use traversal and ZODB.