Steven Wilcox / Python army-days

Created Mon, 16 Sep 2024 09:26:04 -0500 Modified Sat, 12 Apr 2025 06:49:16 -0700
396 Words
python army-days uv tdd claude

A Python version of army-days

It only seemed right that I would actually create a python version of my army-days program.

Goals

  • Feature parity with other versions.
  • Publish as a pypi package so folks can easily install it.
  • Analyze how things are easier/harder in python versus other languages.
  • Reasonable error handling and schema validation.
  • Add on additional functionality as appropriate, specifically:
    • Sample configuration file generation.

note

While I’m trying to keep things the same across different languages, in terms of functionality, I’m not 100% committed to compatibility. Still, I do check running the different implementations against the same configuration file(s).

Learnings

  • This was a first time deploying to PyPI from a uv project. But it really wasn’t bad at all.
    • I did need to do a quick rename of project, because I’d initially called the actual package name py-army-days which is a bit of a pain when installing and running compared to the much more suitable army-days.
    • I also ran into this issue with the uv cache. I had to do the --refresh to get my new package.
  • Not having to do classic dependency injection for certain things in python sure is nice for tests. So it was nice to use freezegun to set a fixed datetime with a decorator. And also a fairly simple task to capture stdout as part of a test:
    with io.StringIO() as buf:
      with contextlib.redirect_stdout(buf):
        _output_color_events(results)
      output_data = buf.getvalue()

  • Speaking of output, I actually find the colorized ANSI output libraries for python (like colorama and a few others) to be frustrating. Colorama doesn’t support underline (because of Windows compatibility issues) and all the other libraries seemed to avoid easily adding TrueColor support. My goal is subtle background shading on alternating lines and it was frustrating to not be able to easily find that. Turned out to be easier to ask Claude to generate python functions to return rgb background and foreground ANSI codes. So in essence, I rolled my own basic ANSI colors library.

  • Obviously, could have a basic working program much much shorter than this. The entire program could be done without a single additional library and in a single script. But I was also aiming for decent error checking and organization and tests.

TLDR;

Python is still the easiest and fastest way for me to code and also have tests.

Future project

My own simple ANSI color text library.