Start with a skeleton specfile, which can be generated using rpmdev-newspec:

rpmdev-newspec supervisor.spec

The example specfile used to write this post can be found here.

Package metadata

The basic package metadata can be extracted from Supervisors existing package metadata (setup.py) and it’s website (supervisord.org).

Name: supervisor
Version: 3.0
Release: 1
Summary: A system for controlling process state under UNIX

Group: System Environment/Daemons
License: https://github.com/Supervisor/supervisor/blob/master/LICENSES.txt
URL: http://supervisord.org/

%description
Supervisor is a client/server system that allows its users to control a number
of processes on UNIX-like operating systems.

Defining requirements

Supervisor requires Python 2.4 or above (excluding Python 3.0), Setuptools (a packaging library), and meld3 (a library used inside Supervisor). In CentOS, these are...

watch-fs is a small, simple tool that watches a directory and runs commands when files change.

Lots of similar tools already exist - nodemon, my own spotter, inotifywait. Each of them have been to complex to use quickly, or in the case of nodemon, are geared towards a specific use case.

watch-fs aims to work as simply as possible out of the box, with any non-essential features being optional.

watch-fs "echo File changed"

In this example, watch-fs will echo File changed any time a file changes in the current directory. It will ignore further file changes for a short delay once the command finished. This is so that editors (and commands) that change multiple files don’t result in the command running several times.

Commands can use the name and path of the file that changed:

watch-fs "echo File '{name}' changed at path '{path}'"

A few arguments control optional features:

watch-fs

This article explains the Tox configuration used by several of my Python projects, which both tests the module on multiple versions of python and runs testing-related tools for style guides, static code checking and coverage reports.

The tox.ini used here is taken from Supermann, and the source can be found here.

Running pytest to find and run tests

py.test is used to discover, run and write tests. It uses tox.ini as a configuration file by default, and the two tools work very well in combination. The first two sections tell Tox to use the default Python 2.6 and 2.7 environments, to install pytest and mock as test dependancies, and to uses py.test to run the modules tests.

[tox]
envlist=py26,py27

[testenv]
commands=py.test supermann
deps=
    pytest
    mock

[pytest]
addopts=-qq --strict --tb=short

Running flake8 to check code

flake8 wraps several Python tools for static...