gistapi

Gistapi is a simple HTTP API server implemented in Flask for searching a user's public Github Gists. The gistapi code in this repository has been left incomplete for you to finish.

Contents

This project contains a tox definition for testing against both Python 2.7 and Python 3.4. There is a requirements.txt file for installing the required Python modules via pip. There is a Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml file if you'd like to run the project as a docker container. The tests/ directory contains two very simple tests to get started. The gistapi/ directory contains the code you'll want to modify to implement the desired features.

Challenge

The existing code already implements most of the Flask boilerplate for you. The main functionality is left for you to implement. The goal is to implement an endpoint that searches a user's Gists with a regular expression. For example, I'd like to know all Gists for user justdionysus that contain the pattern import requests. There is also a failing test that should pass once you've successfully implemented the search process (and should illustrate the expected format of the response). The code in gistapi.py contains some comments to help you find your way.

To complete the challenge, you'll have to write some HTTP queries from Gistapi to the Github API to pull down each Gist for the target user.
Please don't use a github API client (i.e. using an HTTP request library like requests or aiohttp or urllib3 is fine but not PyGithub or similar).

There are also a number of places in the code marked # BONUS where additional code would yield a more robust or performant service. If you finish the above quickly, feel free to investigate these added features or anything else you think might make for an interesting demo. Please don't work on the additional optional features before the main task is complete.

Environment

The project assumes Python 2.7 is installed and libffi and libssl development libraries are installed. If you plan to use tox to run the tests, you should pip install tox also. If you plan to use docker and docker-compose those will have to be installed.

Development

The code will be checked while running in a Docker container but there is no requirement to develop/test inside docker. The simplest way is to use a virtualenv for development:

    ~/Projects/coding_challenge% virtualenv ./env
    New python executable in /home/dion/Projects/coding_challenge/env/bin/python
    Installing setuptools, pip, wheel...done.
    ~/Projects/coding_challenge% source env/bin/activate
    (env) ~/Projects/coding_challenge% pip install -r requirements.txt
    Collecting Flask==0.10.1 (from -r requirements.txt (line 7))
    ...
    Successfully installed Flask-0.10.1 Jinja2-2.8 MarkupSafe-0.23 Werkzeug-0.11.4 gunicorn-19.4.5 itsdangerous-0.24 requests-2.9.1 six-1.10.0
    (env) ~/Projects/coding_challenge% python -m gistapi.gistapi
     * Running on http://0.0.0.0:8000/ (Press CTRL+C to quit)
     * Restarting with stat
     * Debugger is active!
     * Debugger pin code: 111-111-111
	
    # In another terminal:
    ~/Projects/coding_challenge% curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
           -X POST \
           -d '{"username": "justdionysus", "pattern": "LOL[ab]*"}' \
           http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/search
    {
      "matches": [],
      "pattern": "LOL[ab]*",
      "status": "success",
      "username": "justdionysus"
    }

    # When done, Ctrl-C in the server window
    # When done working on the code, deactivate the virtualenv:
    (env) ~/Projects/coding_challenge% deactivate
    ~/Projects/coding_challenge%

Testing your code can be done via tox. No virtualenv is necessary; tox takes care of setting up a test environment with Python 2.7. Running the test is as simple as:

    ~/Projects/coding_challenge% sudo pip install tox
    ...
    ~/Projects/coding_challenge% tox
    GLOB sdist-make: /home/dion/Projects/coding_challenge/setup.py
    py27 inst-nodeps: /home/dion/Projects/coding_challenge/.tox/dist/gistapi-0.1.0.zip    
    ...
    _______________________________________________________________________ summary ________________________________________________________________________
      py27: commands succeeded
      congratulations :)
    ~/Projects/coding_challenge%

You can check for PEP8 compliance and run a few other static analysis checks via a different tox target:

    ~Projects/coding_challenge% tox -e flake8
    GLOB sdist-make: /home/dion/Projects/coding_challenge/setup.py
    flake8 inst-nodeps: /home/dion/Projects/coding_challenge/.tox/dist/gistapi-0.1.0.zip
    ...
    _______________________________________________________________________ summary ________________________________________________________________________
      flake8: commands succeeded
      congratulations :)
    ~/Projects/coding_challenge%