spark-fast-tests VS Task

I was a Databricks user for 5 years and spent 95% of my time developing Spark code in IDEs. See the spark-daria and spark-fast-tests projects as Scala examples. I developed internal libraries with all the business logic. The Databricks notebooks would consist of a few lines of code that would invoke a function in the proprietary Spark codebase. The proprietary Spark codebase would depend on the OSS libraries I developed in parallel.

https://github.com/MrPowers/spark-fast-tests https://github.com/97arushisharma/Scala_Practice/tree/master/BigData_Analysis_with_Scala_and_Spark/wikipedia

If the majority of your stuff is not UDF-based there is an OS solution to run assertion tests against full data frames called spark-fast-tests. The idea here is similar in that you have a it notebook that calls your actual notebook against a staged input reads the output and compares it to a prefabed expected output. This does take a bit of setup and trial and error but it’s the closest I’ve been able to get to proper automated regression testing in databricks

I am the author of spark-fast-tests and chispa, libraries for unit testing Scala Spark / PySpark code.

I built daria (https://github.com/MrPowers/spark-daria) to make it easier to write Spark and spark-fast-tests (https://github.com/MrPowers/spark-fast-tests) to provide a good testing workflow.

quinn (https://github.com/MrPowers/quinn) and chispa (https://github.com/MrPowers/chispa) are the PySpark equivalents.

Built bebe (https://github.com/MrPowers/bebe) to expose the Spark Catalyst expressions that aren't exposed to the Scala / Python APIs.

Also build spark-sbt.g8 to create a Spark project with a single command: https://github.com/MrPowers/spark-sbt.g8

I've built popular PySpark (quinn, chispa) and Scala Spark (spark-daria, spark-fast-tests) libraries.

So many tools in this space! This one looks a little bit like go-task, but it seems maybe better for production workflows because if timeout support, while go-task seems more aimed to command line work/makefile replacement.

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https://github.com/go-task/task

View on GitHub

A similar tool is `task` https://taskfile.dev/ . It is quite capable and also a single executable. I've grown to quite like it.

check out tasks - a bit of a learning curve but arguably more powerful imo

That's when I came across taskfile.dev. Task is an automation tool designed to be more accessible than other options, such as GNU Make.

Full disclosure, I did not review Conda or Hatch fully. Not that there is anything explicitly wrong with either of them. Conda is too specific to the scientific community for my general taste. Hatch seems to go well with Conda and also uses the PyProject manifest as well. It's nice that it gives you several built in tools, similar to commit hooks, but I tend to like to roll my own via a Taskfile and run them with Poetry.

Taskfile is a tool for streamlining repetitive development tasks. It helps automate activities like building, testing, and deploying applications. Unlike Makefile, Taskfile uses YAML for configuration, making it more readable and user-friendly.

9. We test everything with another promotion which runs make targets which build docker containers to run python scripts (pytest)

This is also built by a complicated web of wildcarded makefile targets, which need to be interoperable and support a few if/else cases for specific components.

My plan is to migrate all of this to something simpler and more straightforward, or at least more maintainable, which is honestly probably going to turn into taskfile[0] instead of makefiles, and then simple python scripts for the glue that ties everything together or does more complex logic.

My hope is that it can be more straightforward and easier to maintain, with more component-ized logic, but realistically every step in that labyrinthine build process (and that's just the open-source version!) came from a decision made by a very talented team of engineers who know far more about the process and the product than I do. At this point I'm wondering if it would make 'more sense' to replace it with a giant python script of some kind and get access to all the logic we need all at once (it would not).

[0] https://taskfile.dev/

task - a task runner and a replacement for make