Destructive CouchDocs

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After working with OptionParser a bit, I settle on this updated command line interface for my couch_docs gem:

cstrom@whitefall:~/repos/couch_docs$ ./bin/couch-docs -h
Usage: couch-docs push|dump [OPTIONS] couchdb_url [target_dir]

If a target_dir is not specified, the current working directory will be used.

Push options:
    -R, --destructive                Drop the couchdb_uri (if it exists) and create a new database
    -b, --bulk [BATCH_SIZE=1000]     Use bulk insert when pushing new documents

Dump options:
    -d, --design                     Only dump design documents
    -D, --data                       Only dump data documents

Common options:
    -v, --version                    Show version
    -h, --help                       Show this message

The most important of these options for me is the --destructive option. It is a pain to have to drop/create databases manually when I am trying to test things out. Happily this is trivial to implement—thanks to the extreme RESTful nature of CouchDB. Specifically, creating a database is accomplished with the same PUT operation that is used to create a document. The couch_docs gem already has a facility for creating documents and for replacing existing documents as needed—the Store#put! method.

And so I do something I have yet to do in this incarnation of my chain, I write an RSpec spec:

describe CouchDocs do
  it "should be able to create (or delete/create) a DB" do
    Store.
      should_receive(:put!).
      with("couchdb_url")

    CouchDocs.destructive_database_create("couchdb_url")
  end
#...
end

Simple enough. When I do a destructive database create, I tell the Store class to perform a (possibly) destructive put. Running my spec, I get a failure because I have not defined the destructive_database_create method:

cstrom@whitefall:~/repos/couch_docs$ spec ./spec/couch_docs_spec.rb 
F..........................

1)
NoMethodError in 'CouchDocs should be able to create (or delete/create) a DB'
undefined method `destructive_database_create' for CouchDocs:Module
./spec/couch_docs_spec.rb:9:

Finished in 0.077468 seconds

27 examples, 1 failure

Ah, good to be back in the change-the-message, make it pass cycle. After getting the spec to pass, I give it a try from the command line only to find:

cstrom@whitefall:~/repos/couch_docs$ ./bin/couch-docs -R push http://localhost:5984/test ~/repos/eee-code/seed/seed2/
/home/cstrom/repos/couch_docs/lib/couch_docs.rb:63:in `put!': wrong number of arguments (1 for 2) (ArgumentError)
        from /home/cstrom/repos/couch_docs/lib/couch_docs.rb:63:in `destructive_database_create'
        from /home/cstrom/repos/couch_docs/lib/couch_docs/command_line.rb:26:in `run'
        from /home/cstrom/repos/couch_docs/lib/couch_docs/command_line.rb:10:in `run'
        from ./bin/couch-docs:8

Ah, bummer. All of my PUTs so far have been of a document to an existing database. When creating a new database, there is no document.

It turns out that I can put anything I like when creating a database and CouchDB will happily ignore it for for me:

cstrom@whitefall:~/repos/couch_docs$ curl -X DELETE http://localhost:5984/test
{"ok":true}
cstrom@whitefall:~/repos/couch_docs$ curl -X PUT http://localhost:5984/test -d '{"foo":"bar"}'
{"ok":true}
cstrom@whitefall:~/repos/couch_docs$ curl -X GET http://localhost:5984/test/_all_docs
{"total_rows":0,"offset":0,"rows":[]}

I do not see any reason to expect that CouchDB will change this behavior, so I code to it:

describe CouchDocs do
  it "should be able to create (or delete/create) a DB" do
    Store.
      should_receive(:put!).
      with("couchdb_url", anything())

    CouchDocs.destructive_database_create("couchdb_url")
  end
#...
end

The anything RSpec matcher means that I expect the put! method to receive a second argument, but really do not care what it is. The implementation that makes this pass is:

  # Create or recreate the database located at <tt>db_uri</tt>
  def self.destructive_database_create(db_uri)
    Store.put!(db_uri, "")
  end

To test this out, I install my gem and run it in a seed directory with 4 meal/recipe documents from 2002:

cstrom@whitefall:~/tmp/seed$ ls
2002-08-26-grilled_chicken.json  2002-08-26.json  2002-08-26-pasta.json  2002-08-26-pesto.json
cstrom@whitefall:~/tmp/seed$ couch-docs -R push http://localhost:5984/test

And, checking the test database in Futon, I find that I do indeed have 4 documents now:



That is a good stopping point for tonight. I will pick up tomorrow by being more selective in what I dump to the filesystem (i.e. only design documents, only data, or both).


Day #28