Coming from a C++ background, using Python for the first time was pretty amazing. The ease with which you can link in other libraries and quickly write code is fantastic. Learning and using Git for the first time on the other hand – that took some adjustment.
Git and I are on fairly good terms these days, and I’ve learned to love some of the features it offers compared to TFS (the last source control system I was using), especially when used in conjunction with Github. However I hit a problem the other day that made _zero_ sense to me – and took a surprisingly long time to track down, due to lots of false positives in figuring out the issue.
I’d been switching back and forth between a few branches, and all of a sudden my unit tests were failing, and the app appeared to be testing things that shouldn’t exist in this branch. Not only that, the app suddenly refused to run – I kept getting a pyramid.exceptions.ConfigurationExecutionError error. I found that if I added in a bunch of routes that existed in the _other_ branch, suddenly everything worked.
Experienced Python/Pyramid coders will probably know exactly what the problem was, but I was stumped. It turns out that our Git is configured to ignore .pyc files – which is normally what you want and works fine. However when files exist in one branch and not in another, it can cause all sorts of issues.
There are two main ways of solving this:
- Create a clean_pycs alias in your .bashrc file, that you can run to clean your pycs when you need to – i.e.
alias clean_pycs='find . -name "*.pyc" -exec rm {} \;' - Use a Git hook to automatically clean up the files every time you change branches – more info here.
There are other ways you can do it, mentioned in the follow-up to the blog post above, but these are the two easiest. Which one you use is up to you – I’ve spoken to a few other coders at work, and because we work on a lot of different projects they tend to use the former, rather than having to add the hook in so many Git configs.
Hopefully this blog post helps somebody – I was incredibly thankful when I finally found the blog post linked above!