alx-common 2.7.6

An application framework promoting consistency

alx-common

A comprehensive Python framework for infrastructure automation, monitoring, and reporting. Designed to standardize common development tasks and eliminate code duplication in production environments.

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Prerequisites

Before use, create 2 files in $HOME/.config/alx:

• $HOME/.config/alx/env with contents
  • venv=<path/to/venv> (do not include the /bin path)
  • Other environment settings can also go in here if required
• $HOME/.config/alx/key
  • Add the output from

  python -c "from cryptography.fernet import Fernet; print(Fernet.generate_key().decode())"
  

  • This is your key to encrypt and decrypt strings - do not share

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Summary

alx-common provides a consistent foundation for building reliable internal applications that deal with:

• ✅ Configuration management
• ✅ Argument parsing
• ✅ Different environment handling: dev, test, prod
• ✅ Secure password, etc handling with encryption
• ✅ Logging (including file rotation, maximum size and console output)
• ✅ Database utilities (MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite, PostgreSQL)
• ✅ HTML report generation
• ✅ Email notifications (plain, HTML, attachments, inline images)
• ✅ Monitoring integrations (ITRS Geneos support)
• ✅ Lightweight internal automation tools

Originally designed to simplify and standardize automation scripts, reporting jobs, monitoring pipelines, and operational tooling across real-world production environments. The aim of alx-common is to reduce hard coding and duplication of snippets.

Too many times, I have seen developers share code to 'send an email'. Then the mailhost changes and there are 200 scripts to fix. Or a shell script is copied and something edited to create a wrapper to start a python script. Or the same code is used over and over to set up logging or read a configuration file coupled with a lot of hard coding an inconsistencies.

Bad practice is endemic in the developer community as there are too many coders adopting a cut-and-paste mentality.

The name comes from my company, ALX Solutions which is no longer in operation.

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Features

• Application Framework (alx.app.ALXapp)

  • Simplified argparse-based CLI definition
  • Config-driven parameter management (alx.ini)
  • Environment separation (dev/test/prod)
  • Secure password storage (Fernet encryption)
  • Dynamic path management (logs, data, config)
  • Application configuration automatically parsed and stored in alx.app.ALXapp object
  • Centralized logger management handled providing automatic house-keeping based on configuration

• Database Utilities (alx.db_util.ALXdatabase)

  • Simplifies open source database access
  • Auto-formatted SQL logging
  • Centralized connection lifecycle
  • Transaction management
  • Simplified execution mechanism

• Reporting (alx.html.ALXhtml)

  • Easy HTML generation
  • Promotes tidy and consistent code

• Email creation (alx.mail.ALXmail)

  • Supports plaintext and html formats
  • Easy email formatting and sending
  • Flexible
  • Integrated with SMTP servers, attachments, and inline images

• String manipulation (strings.py)

  • Commonly used string manipulation routines

• ITRS Geneos Alerts (alx.itrs.alert.HtmlAlert)

  • Provides a consistent way to parse the environment on an event
  • A standard alert in html / table format
  • A class to create a toolkit sampler without the need to know internal details (alx.itrs.toolkit.Toolkit)
  • Standardised environment parsing (alx.itrs.environment.Environment)

Examples

Please refer to the files in the examples directory