REST with Python: awesome API development tools and docs

Here goes a collection of links I find very useful to keep handy regarding RESTful APIs and Python:

Frameworks/libraries

• eve: Python REST API Framework (Flask, MongoDB and Redis)
• Partial JSON API implementation in Python
• JSONAPI implementation for use with SQLAlchemy
• Django REST framework
• Tastypie (for Django)
• Flask-RESTful
• Flask API (lots of future and nice projection, not the best documentation)
• Flask-Restless (only for SQLAlchemy, but with a lot of features like pagination, filters, pre/post-processors, etc.)
• Restless is a lightweight API framework that aims to be framework agnostic.
• Implementation of JSON Schema for Python
• A Practical API Design Framework

Videos/blog posts/Tutorials

• Developing RESTful Web APIs with Flask and mongodb (from the author of eve).
• Versioned and versionless APIs
• Designing a RESTful Web API
• HTTP API Design Guide
• REST API Tutorial
• 18F API Standards
• Designing a Beautiful REST+JSON API (blog post)

Others

• API Testing for Humans
• Very good/interesting: http://raml.org/ Tools: http://raml.org/projects.html
• http://www.intridea.com/blog/2010/4/29/rest-isnt-what-you-think-it-is

Dealing with speed

• json, from the Python standard library, is slow and performance can be improved using ujson
• SQLAlchemy has an option to cache connections: connection pool.

Special thanks to Juan Norris for creating and letting me share the original document here.

Reset the DNS cache in OS X

Learn how to reset (flush) the DNS cache.

About the DNS cache

OS X keeps a local cache of resolved DNS queries for a time defined by the DNS server. Sometimes it might be necessary to reset the cache immediately and re-query a DNS server. For example, you might need to do this if you are a network or server administrator and an entry on your DNS server has recently changed.

If your Mac isn't using the latest DNS entries from your server, you can restart your Mac to update its cached information. If you need to update DNS entries on a server using OS X and you can't restart the server, use the terminal commands below for the version of OS X you're using.

OS X Yosemite

Use the following Terminal command to reset the DNS cache:

sudo discoveryutil mdnsflushcache

OS X Mavericks, Mountain Lion, and Lion

Use the following Terminal command to reset the DNS cache:

sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

Mac OS X v10.6

Use the following Terminal command to reset the DNS cache:

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache

How to undo a git rebase / squash / fixup? (a.k.a. "we all poop it sometimes")

Today I had a bit of a mess in one of my PRs by doing an interactive rebase (git rebase -i HEAD~) and a fixup / squash.

Now: What to do now, after doing the wrong squash?

Good news: virtually everything can be undone in GIT :)

"git reflog" was what I was looking for to put thing where they were before:

$ git reflog

At this point you'll see a long list of commits like this one:

 $ git reflog

e074e05 HEAD@{0}: rebase: aborting

b3885fe HEAD@{1}: rebase -i (start): checkout HEAD~7

e074e05 HEAD@{2}: pull origin master: Merge made by the 'recursive' strategy.

b3885fe HEAD@{3}: rebase -i (finish): returning to refs/heads/ticket

b3885fe HEAD@{4}: rebase -i (pick): something

....

Then you need to pick the action you want to go back to and reset to it with this command:

$ git reset --hard HEAD@{N}

Where "N" is the number between curly braces from the list of commits displayed by git reflog.

Et voilà!

Get file extension from filename with Python

Several times I had to put some code together some Python code to get the extension from a filename.

It was required for it to work OK with complex extensions, like ".tar.gz", and remain functional when you have dots in the filename, like in this case: "some.filename.1.v2.tar.gz".

After trying several options, the one that did the trick was using regular expressions, wrapped in a little function.

Here the case for keeping the ".", and getting the extension in the fashion ".tar.gz" or ".png":



Here the case for not keeping the ".", and getting the extension in the fashion "tar.gz" or "png":




Et voilà! :D

Smile, it's Friday :D

The geekiest pin numbers

E2E testing with Protractor for AngularJS: Switch to iframe context in order to see inside iframe

Little useful tip:

// Switch to iframe context in order to see inside iframe
browser.switchTo().frame(element(by.tagName('iframe')));