Before starting, please read the AirBnB concept page. First step: Write a command interpreter to manage your AirBnB objects.
This is the first step towards building your first full web application: the AirBnB clone. This first step is very important because you will use what you build during this project with all other following projects: HTML/CSS templating, database storage, API, front-end integration…
Each task is linked and will help you to:
- put in place a parent class (called BaseModel) to take care of the initialization, serialization and deserialization of your future instances
- create a simple flow of serialization/deserialization: Instance <-> Dictionary <-> JSON string <-> file
- create all classes used for AirBnB (User, State, City, Place…) that inherit from BaseModel
- create the first abstracted storage engine of the project: File storage.
- create all unittests to validate all our classes and storage engine
Do you remember the Shell? It’s exactly the same but limited to a specific use-case. In our case, we want to be able to manage the objects of our project:
- Create a new object (ex: a new User or a new Place)
- Retrieve an object from a file, a database etc…
- Do operations on objects (count, compute stats, etc…)
- Update attributes of an object
- Destroy an object
At the end of this project, you are expected to be able to explain to anyone, without the help of Google:
- How to create a Python package
- How to create a command interpreter in Python using the cmd module
- What is Unit testing and how to implement it in a large project
- How to serialize and deserialize a Class
- How to write and read a JSON file
- How to manage datetime
- What is an UUID
- What is *args and how to use it
- What is **kwargs and how to use it
- How to handle named arguments in a function
Your shell should work like this in interactive mode:
$ ./console.py
(hbnb) help
Documented commands (type help <topic>):
========================================
EOF help quit
(hbnb)
(hbnb)
(hbnb) quit
$
But also in non-interactive mode: (like the Shell project in C)
$ echo "help" | ./console.py
(hbnb)
# Documented commands (type help <topic>):
EOF help quit
(hbnb)
$
$ cat test_help
help
$
$ cat test_help | ./console.py
(hbnb)
# Documented commands (type help <topic>):
EOF help quit
(hbnb)
$
All tests should also pass in non-interactive mode: $ echo "python3 -m unittest discover tests" | bash