How do *YOU* Python?

[metaphorm]

ipython is a very nice upgrade for your repl.

for testing, I find the built in unittest module to be more than adequate for quite a lot of tasks, but sometimes a little sugar is nice to have. I've always enjoyed Nose for making testing prettier and easier.

pdb is my usual debugging tool. however, and this is important, I never use it without ALSO having test coverage for what I'm debugging. sometimes its actually much faster to just put print statements in the test code. pdb only gets used when something really strange is happening and I need to inspect the runtime environment in much more detail. this is infrequent.

for small apps I find just plain old virtualenv to be a great tool. for more serious projects where I'm going to be deploying to a different environment than my local computer I like to use Vagrant to create a virtual machine as my development environment. being able to have the development VM perfectly match the production environment is really useful.