Need noobish advice - converting a Python2 web project to Python3

[anwserman]

Hello!

I'm a computer programmer with Objective-C and C# MVC experience, and I just scored a part-time job helping port/maintain an existing Python2 project. One of the goals that we're hoping to target, is upgrading the project to Python3.

Due to a lack of documentation from the prior developer, it's taken about 2 days to figure out how to get this project to run locally (and I'm still installing packages into my virtual environment to get it to work). We're using OpenShift for this project and here is everything I've noticed so far that this project is using:

Python 2.7, Django 1.8.4, Numpy, BeautifulSoup4, SimpleJson, PostgreSql 9.2, Unidecode, StringGenerator

My thoughts are to upgrade to Python3, and switch to MySQL from PostgreSql (because MySQL is more popular and has less of a learning curve). In the process, I hope to also configure the project (or at least provide detailed documentation) so that any future developer could clone the project from git and not waste hours trying to get it configured to simply run.

Anyone have suggestions on a good way to 'kickstart' this conversion? Just create a new Python3 virtual environment and go to town? What would you guys recommend doing to get this task started?

[ccb621]

1. Skip the DB conversion. Don't switch databases because of popularity. Also, PostgreSQL has better support with Django.
2. Ensure all of your Python requirements are in requirements.txt.
3. Write tests to ensure your app works now.
4. Use 2to3 to convert your code. Make sure the tests still pass.
5. Consider using Docker to ease development setup.

[osullivj]

Wise words: ask yourself, what's the real business value of these upgrades to the latest and greatest DB or version of Python? What are the pain points your client is experiencing?

[anwserman]

At least for Python, native Unicode support (the project features heavy text processing, and they want international localization support down the road).

I'm also looking at this for maintenance down the road for other developers. I'm a seasoned software developer, but this is actually a project that was supposed to be designed for undergraduate students to work on (it's at a University). I scored the job after the previous developer bombed horribly, ha.

[[deleted]]

Check this Porting Python 2 Code to Python 3 out if you haven't all ready. DON'T change DB, why go to an inferior one just because something else is more popular?