Best Practices for Fedora Infrastructure Apps
Coding style
- Python code should be PEP8 compliant
Centralized logging
Most of our apps use the standard Python logging module, which usually ends up logging to /var/log/httpd/error_log on the app server.
To have your app logs shipped to our central logging server, you can configure the SysLogHandler to do so.
For config-file based logging setups, you can do something like the following:
[logging]
[[handlers]]
[[[syslog_out]]]
class='handlers.SysLogHandler'
args="('/dev/log', handlers.SysLogHandler.LOG_LOCAL4,)"
formatter='full_content'
[[loggers]]
[[[bodhi]]]
level='DEBUG'
qualname='bodhi'
handlers=['syslog_out']
propagate=0
Here is an example of doing it in pure Python:
import logging
import logging.handlers
syslogger = logging.getLogger('bodhi')
syslogger.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
handler = logging.handlers.SysLogHandler(address='/dev/log', facility=logging.handlers.SysLogHandler.LOG_LOCAL4)
syslogger.addHandler(handler)
syslogger.info('Hello SysLog!')
The app logs will then appear in /var/log/hosts/<HOST>/<YEAR>/<MONTH>/<DAY>/apps.log as well as the merged log /var/log/merged/apps.log on our central rsyslog server.
Translations
Use transifex to manage translations and add the projects to the Fedora Project Team so the Fedora i18n team can translate.
Do not mark Exception messages for translation. We want those to remain untranslated for several reasons:
- It's easier to do a web search for the exceptions if the messages aren't translated.
- Translators don't know what all the technical information in exception messages are so the translations aren't always accurate.
- The exception messages aren't intended for end users -- they're to help with debugging or other coders. So it's not very useful to translate them.
Web Frameworks
Use one of Flask, Pyramid, or TurboGears2. Limiting the number of web frameworks we're responsible for will greatly help with our long term maintenance burden.