| Story points | 8 |
| Tags | tdd mocks environmental variables smtp |
| Hard Prerequisites |
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This basic project should demonstrate your understanding of mocks/spies.
We’ll be making an application that ends emails.
Step 1 is to sign up for SendinBlue. You can sign up for the free plan. Once you are logged in click on the “Transactional” tab at the top of the page. You’ll see some SMTP settings. It’ll look something like this:
SMTP server: smtp-relay.sendinblue.com
Port: 587
Login: ???
Password: ?????
Note, SMTP isn’t the most super secure way to authenticate with the email servers. But it’s the simplest way. For now let’s keep it simple. We’re really here to practice unit testing.
Take these settings and save them in a shell script called smtp_secrets.sh. It should look like this.
#!/bin/sh
export SMTP_SERVER=smtp-relay.sendinblue.com
export SMTP_PORT=587
export SMTP_LOGIN=???
export SMTP_PASSWORD=?????
Why? Because we don’t mix code and configuration. Your code should be able to access configuration when it needs to.
Now add the following line to your .gitignore file:
smtp_secrets.sh
Why? Because these credentials should be kept secret. If you commit them to your git repo and push it to github then anyone who has access to your repo can read your secrets and start sending emails from your account.
This remains true even if you make a commit that removes the secrets from the repo.
So far so good.
Now try this out in the terminal
source smtp_secrets.sh
#############################
# if you are running Python #
#############################
python3
# now you are in a python shell
import os
SMTP_SERVER = os.getenv('SMTP_SERVER')
print(SMTP_SERVER)
###########################
# if you are running Node #
###########################
node
# now you are in a node shell
const SMTP_SERVER = process.env.SMTP_SERVER;
console.log(SMTP_SERVER)
Ok, what just happened?
Basically when you open up a new terminal you are running bash (or some variation thereof). Bash is a programming language and has variables too. When you define bash variables you can choose to export them. Exporting a bash variable makes it accessable to other programs running in the same terminal.
So when we call source smtp_secrets.sh, bash makes a few variables and makes sure that if you launch another application then those secrets are available.
Cool eh?
If you want some further reading check this out: TOPICS: Environmental Variables
Write a program that sends a random inspirational quote to an email address. The email address should be a command-line parameter passed to the program.
You should have a list of quotes in a file by itself. Your program should grab one and send the email.
Your final email quotes should be formatted like this:
"The only true measure of success if the number of people you have helped" — Ray Dalio
After npm init you should add your own script to package.json. Look for scripts inside the file.
you should be able to do the following:
npm run send_inspiration ...
The command needs to allow you to pass in an email address from the command line. Take a look at this
you should be able to run your code using
python send_inspiration.py ...
The command needs to allow you to pass in an email address from the command line. Take a look at this
Go with the simplest option you can find initially - because KISS
Your unit tests should make sure that when the application runs then it sends one email with one quote to one person.
If your tests
then they are wrong.