Development

Goals

Goals:

  • clearly documented API

  • minimal web interface

  • minimal CLI

Development should follow a problem-solution approach.

Roadmap

In no particular order:

  • API to delete old entries. (#96)

  • API to delete duplicate entries. (#140)

  • Batch get related resources API. (#191)

  • update_feeds() filtering. (#193)

  • Web application re-design.

  • Plugin system / hooks stabilization. (#80)

  • Internal API stabilization.

  • CLI stabilization.

  • Web application stabilization.

  • OPML support. (#165)

Style guide

reader uses the Black style.

You should enforce it by using pre-commit. To install it into your git hooks, run:

pip install pre-commit  # ./run.sh install-dev already does both
pre-commit install

Every time you clone the repo, running pre-commit install should always be the first thing you do.

Testing

First, install the testing dependencies:

./run.sh install-dev    # or
pip install '.[search,cli,app,tests,dev,unstable-plugins]'

Run tests using the current Python interpreter:

pytest --runslow

Run tests using the current Python interpreter, but skip slow tests:

pytest

Run tests for all supported Python versions:

tox

Run tests with coverage and generate an HTML report (in ./htmlcov):

./run.sh coverage-all

Run the type checker:

./run.sh typing         # or
mypy --strict src

Start a local development server for the web application:

./run.sh serve-dev      # or

FLASK_DEBUG=1 FLASK_TRAP_BAD_REQUEST_ERRORS=1 \
FLASK_APP=src/reader/_app/wsgi.py \
READER_DB=db.sqlite flask run -h 0.0.0.0 -p 8000

Building the documentation

First, install the dependencie:

pip install '.[docs]'   # ./run.sh install-dev already does it for you

The documentation is built with Sphinx:

./run.sh docs           # or
make -C docs html       # using Sphinx's Makefile directly

The built HTML docs should be in ./docs/_build/html/.

Making a release

Making a release (from x to y == x + 1):

Note

scripts/release.py already does most of these.

  • (release.py) bump version in src/reader/__init__.py to y

  • (release.py) update changelog with release version and date

  • (release.py) make sure tests pass / docs build

  • (release.py) clean up dist/: rm -rf dist/

  • (release.py) build tarball and wheel: python -m build

  • (release.py) push to GitHub

  • (release.py prompts) wait for GitHub Actions / Codecov / Read the Docs builds to pass

  • upload to test PyPI and check: twine upload --repository-url https://test.pypi.org/legacy/ dist/*

  • (release.py) upload to PyPI: twine upload dist/*

  • (release.py prompts) tag release in GitHub

  • build docs from latest and enable y docs version (should happen automatically after the first time)

  • (release.py) bump versions from y to (y + 1).dev0, add (y + 1) changelog section

  • (release.py prompts) deactivate old versions in Read the Docs

Design notes

Folowing are various design notes that aren’t captured somewhere else (either in the code, or in the issue where a feature was initially developed).

Why use SQLite and not SQLAlchemy?

tl;dr: For “historical reasons”.

In the beginning:

  • I wanted to keep things as simple as possible, so I don’t get demotivated and stop working on it. I also wanted to try out a “problem-solution” approach.

  • I think by that time I was already a great SQLite fan, and knew that because of the relatively single-user nature of the thing I won’t have to change databases because of concurrency issues.

  • The fact that I didn’t know exactly where and how I would deploy the web app (and that SQLite is in stdlib) kinda cemented that assumption.

Since then, I did come up with some of my own complexity: there’s a SQL query builder, a schema migration system, and there were some concurrency issues. SQLAlchemy would have likely helped with the first two, but not with the last one (not without dropping SQLite).

Note that it is possible to use a different storage implementation; all storage stuff happens through a DAO-style interface, and SQLAlchemy was the main real alternative I had in mind. The API is private at the moment (1.10), but if anyone wants to use it I can make it public.

It is unlikely I’ll write a SQLAlchemy storage myself, since I don’t need it (yet), and I think testing it with multiple databases would take quite some time.

Multiple storage implementations

Detailed requirements and API discussion: #168#issuecomment-642002049.

Parser

file:// handling, feed root, per-URL-prefix parsers (later retrievers, see below):

Requests session plugins:

Retriever / parser split:

Metrics

Some thoughts on implementing metrics: #68#issuecomment-450025175.

Query builder

Survey of possible options: #123#issuecomment-582307504.

Pagination for methods that return iterators

Why do it for the private implementation: #167#issuecomment-626753299 (also a comment in storage code).

Detailed requirements and API discussion for public pagination: #196#issuecomment-706038363.

reader types to Atom mapping

This whole issue: #153.

Sort by random

Some thoughts in the initial issue: #105.

Entry/feed “primary key” attribute naming

This whole issue: #159#issuecomment-612914956.

Change feed URL

From the initial issue:

Feed tags

Detailed requirements and API discussion: #184#issuecomment-689587006.

Entry user data

#228#issuecomment-810098748 discusses three different kinds, how they would be implemented, and why I want more use-cases before implementing them (basically, YAGNI):

  • entry searchable text fields (for notes etc.)

  • entry tags (similar to feed tags, can be used as additional bool flags)

  • entry metadata (similar to feed metadata)

    • also discusses how to build an enclosure cache/preloader (doesn’t need special reader features besides what’s available in 1.16)

Feed updates

Some thoughts about adding a map argument: #152#issuecomment-606636200.

How update_feeds() is like a pipeline: comment.

Data flow diagram for the update process, as of v1.13: #204#issuecomment-779709824.

update_feeds_iter():

Disabling updates:

Updating entries based on a hash of their content (regardless of updated):

Decision to ignore feed.updated when updating feeds: #231.

Counts API

Detailed requirements and API discussion: #185#issuecomment-731743327.

Using None as a special argument value

This comment: #177#issuecomment-674786498.

Batch update (set) methods

There’s a discussion on why I want to postpone this in this comment: #187#issuecomment-700740251.

Using a single Reader objects from multiple threads

Some thoughts on why it’s difficult to do: #206#issuecomment-751383418.

Plugins

List of hooks (unmaintained as of 2021): #80.

Minimal plugin API (case study and considetrations for the built-in plugin naming scheme): 229#issuecomment-803870781.

Reserved names

Requirements, thoughts about the naming scheme and prefixes unlikely to collide with user names: #186 (multiple comments).

Wrapping underlying storage exceptions

Which exception to wrap, and which not: #21#issuecomment-365442439.