Recently I wrote a Python command line app and had some trouble finding a good example of how to test it using best practices. Some ideas I ran across in my search:

• Use a 3rd party CLI-testing solution like ScriptTest or a framework that includes testing like pyCLI.

I write my other tests with unittest and run them with nose. I don’t think there’s anything special about a CLI that requires the rest of my team to learn YATT (yet another testing tool).

• Use sys.argv, subprocess or some combination of both.

This feels very hacky to me. Writing a Python CLI using sys.argv is a little silly considering the more robust options out there. argparse is in the standard library. 3rd party tools like clint and cliff are frameworks that seem promising. A testing solution that plays to the strength of these tools is ideal.

Personally, I use argparse. It does everything I need and its API is

So Vagrant is great. If you’re not using it yet, you should check it out. It allows you to develop your applications in the same environment they’ll be running in.

I’ve been using Vagrant and Chef for a little over a year now, but I hadn’t used Ruby much before. I’ve written a lot of Chef cookbooks and Vagrantfiles since then. Writing a multi-VM Vagrantfile is much easier if you lean on Ruby to help you keep them shorter and more readable.

Here’s an example of a Vagrantfile with 3 Ubuntu LTS 12.04 machines:

• clean - A base box, with nothing installed. For experimentation.
• mongo - A MongoDB box, provisioned with chef-solo.
• jenkins - A Jenkins CI box, provisioned with chef-solo.

There are 3 parts to the Vagrantfile.

1: Box definitions

Boxes can be configured with several options, most of them optional. The schema is defined at the top of the file.

=begin
Example box JSON schema
{