AirBnB clone - The console

About

In this project issued as part of the Software Engineering coursework at ALX Holberton, we were introduced to the steps of building a web application.

The console is the first step towards building our first full web application: The AirBnB clone. This first step is very important because we will use what we build during this project with all other following projects: HTML/CSS templating, database storage, API, front-end integration etc.

Each task here is linked and will enable us to perform the following tasks:

put in place a parent class BaseModel to take care of the initialization, serialization and deserialization of our future instances.
create a simple flow of serialization/deserialization: Instance <-> Dictionary <-> JSON string <-> file
create all classes used for AirBnB (User, State, City, Amenity, Place and Review) 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.

Getting started on the console

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS - Operating system required.
Python version 3.8.5 and subsequent used.

Usage

The console program is available in the AirBnB_clone repository under the module console.py. It's an executable Python script and you can run it on an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS terminal by invoking this command: ./console.py.

Examples of Usage

From the code snippet below, you can see that the console works in both interactive and non-interactive mode. There are various commands that you can use to manage data/file objects in the various classes created for the program. When the help command is invoked, you can see all the available commands on the console. Use this command: help <cmd> as in help followed by the command without the angle brackets to view the documentation and the usage guide for each command.

f-ayot@mypc:~/AirBnB_clone$ ./console.py     # This is in an interactive mode
(hbnb) help

Documented commands (type help <topic>):
========================================
EOF  all  clear  count  create  destroy  help  quit  show  update

(hbnb) help create
 Creates a new instance of BaseModel, saves it
            (to the JSON file) and prints the id.
            Usage: create <class>

(hbnb) all HighClass
** class doesn't exist **
(hbnb) count User
0
(hbnb) show Place
** instance id missing **
(hbnb) create User
76673790-407c-4022-ae94-9feb5b085044
(hbnb) User.all()
["[User] (76673790-407c-4022-ae94-9feb5b085044) {'id': '76673790-407c-4022-ae94-9feb5b085044', 'created_at': datetime.datetime(2023, 8, 10, 14, 34, 40, 86778), 'updated_at': datetime.datetime(2023, 8, 10, 14, 34, 40, 86796)}"]
(hbnb) User.count()
1
(hbnb) Amenity.show("The Falls")
** no instance found **
(hbnb) User.destroy()
** instance id missing **
(hbnb) User.destroy("76673790-407c-4022-ae94-9feb5b085044")
(hbnb) User.count()
0
(hbnb) wrong cmd
*** Unknown syntax: wrong cmd
(hbnb)
f-ayot@mypc:~/AirBnB_clone$ echo "help" | ./console.py            # This is in a non-interactive mode
(hbnb)
Documented commands (type help <topic>):
========================================
EOF  all  clear  count  create  destroy  help  quit  show  update

(hbnb)
f-ayot@mypc:~/AirBnB_clone$

Testing

Unit tests for all the class features for each module can be found on the repository using these paths:

Unittests for filestorage.py: tests/test_models/test_engine/test_filestorage.py
Unittests for console.py: tests/test_console.py
Unittests for models module: tests/test_models/test_*

Run the tests using these commands: python3 -m unittest discover tests ,runs all the tests. Alternatively, use python3 -m unittest tests/test_models/test_* or python3 -m unittest tests/test_engine/test_filestorage.py to run specific tests for a given module.

Authors

Felix Ayot < felixayot@gmail.com >
Abraham Maiko Kingoo < bamjnr99@gmail.com >

Acknowledgements

ALX SE program provided the resources and project guidance. More information on this amazing program can be found through this link.

abrakingoo/AirBnB_clone