Local Shell

The Blue Alliance comes with a pre-configured ipython environment to aid in running code locally. This will give you a regular Python interpreter that has the ability to connect to your development instance's datastore.

The Local TBA Shell

> ./ops/shell/tba_shell.sh

You can now import TBA code and run them, as you would in any other python interpreter.

Connecting to the Datastore

The shell will use the same local configuration as the dev app. You can configure the datastore connection properties using tba_dev_config.local.json in your local repository.

The Cloud NDB library requires there be an active NDB connection context, there is a convenience wrapper (shell_lib.connect_to_ndb()) automatically imported for you to use, as part of the shell utilities library:

In [1]: with shell_lib.connect_to_ndb():
   ...:     from backend.common.models.event import Event
   ...:     event = Event.get_by_id("2019ctwat")
   ...:     print(event.name)
   ...:
Connecting to NDB using keyfile ops/dev/keys/tbatv-prod-hrd-key.json
NE District Waterbury Event

Running Local User Scripts

There may be situations where it is preferable to write and commit a simple python script to run against a production datastore instance instead of building it in the interpreter. For that, we also support running scripts as the entrypoint for the special ipython environment.

These scripts are stored in ops/shell/user_scripts and are invoked using the ops/shell/run_user_script.sh wrapper. That script takes the name of the script to run, as well as any relevant arguments after --. For example, here is a simple user script that prints an event:

# Show the script
> cat ops/shell/user_scripts/print_event.py
import argparse

from shell.lib import connect_to_ndb

from backend.common.models.event import Event

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("event_key")
args = parser.parse_args()

with connect_to_ndb():
    print(f"Fetching {args.event_key}...")
    print(Event.get_by_id(args.event_key))

# Run the script
> ./ops/shell/run_user_script.sh print_event.py -- 2019ctwat
Connecting to NDB using keyfile ops/dev/keys/tbatv-prod-hrd-key.json
Fetching 2019ctwat...
Event(key=Key('Event', '2019ctwat'), city='Waterbury' ...