In my previous post about unit testing for django, I laid the groundwork for how to unit test any django application. One nice feature that django includes with its test framework is the test database syncing. Even better is if you are using South to do database migrations - it will run the migrations in  your test environment for you.

However, what if you are using a NoSQL database backend like MongoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB or something similar and you aren’t using the Django ORM? How do you handle setting up and tearing down the database environments?

Unit testing is a very important part of any software project. It helps you know that the new code you are deploying works, and isn’t going to blow up in your face. It also helps you feel good about changing large chunks of code without destroying everything you’ve done for the last 3 years.

Unit testing with django is as simple as pie. The documentation is very good, and you can learn a lot about more advanced testing methods from the python documentation. In this blog post, I aim to show a quick way to get up and running with testing your django application.

VIM has been my editor of choice for at least 15 years. I love how fast I can edit files, perform menial tasks, and wreak general havoc on any code project I am working on at any given moment. One of the things that I have missed about VIM from an IDE perspective has been code completion (a.k.a. “IntelliSense”). I have spent a lot of time on websites and man pages trying to figure out syntax and function names for several types of languages, and just recently discovered a long-included feature of VIM called omni completion, or Omnicomplete.

I have been using django for web development for almost a year now, and I just recently started using South to do database migrations. To be fair, most of the work that I have been doing with databases has centered around MongoDB and schema-less document stores instead of a traditional RDBMS. Since Django does not come with any database migration tools, my standard approach was to make sure that my models are completely thought out before running the manage.py syncdb command. The lack of a good database migration tool was one of the things that originally had turned me off to django.

One of the big problems with hosting your own database solution is that you have to do backups for it on a regular basis. Not only do you need to do backups for it, but you need to also keep backups offsite. Luckily, Amazon S3 allows a cheap and easy solution for your offsite backups.

I found a shell script solution for handling MongoDB backups, but it only does local backups. It keeps a nice history of recent backups, and rotates off the oldest ones when the threshold for age is reached. I modified the code to call a Python script that then synchronizes the newly created backup file to S3. I haven’t wired up any purging functionality yet, and I don’t know if I am going to. S3 storage is so cheap that it really doesn’t matter much. A complete solution would, of course, keep your local files and your remote off-site backups in S3 in sync, but there is also a case to be made for keeping a rich history of backups in the “cloud” so as to be able to revert to any point in history if necessary.