The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python

Chapter 8. Code Management and Improvement

This chapter covers libraries used to manage or simplify the development and build process, system integration, server management, and performance optimization.

Continuous Integration

Nobody describes continuous integration better than Martin Fowler:¹

Continuous Integration is a software development practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently, usually each person integrates at least daily—leading to multiple integrations per day. Each integration is verified by an automated build (including test) to detect integration errors as quickly as possible. Many teams find that this approach leads to significantly reduced integration problems and allows a team to develop cohesive software more rapidly.

The three most popular tools for CI right now are Travis-CI, Jenkins, and Buildbot—which are all listed in the following sections. They are frequently used with Tox, a Python tool to manage virtualenv and tests from the command line. Travis is for multiple Python interpreters on a single platform, and Jenkins (most popular) and Buildbot (written in Python) can manage builds on multiple machines. Many also use Buildout (discussed in “Buildout”) and Docker (discussed in “Docker”) to rapidly and repeatably build complex environments for their test battery.

Tox

Tox is an automation tool providing packaging, testing, and deployment of Python software right from the console or CI server. It is a generic virtualenv management ...