Users Service

The Users web service provides a RESTful API for creating, updating, and retrieving users. The Web UI makes calls to this service when a user signs up or updates their profile.

When deployed to AWS, CodePipeline is used to build and deploy the Users service as a Docker container to Amazon ECS behind an Application Load Balancer. The Users service can also be run locally in a Docker container. This makes it easier to iterate on and test changes locally before commiting.

User Test Data

The Users service comes preloaded with 5,000 fake user profiles. The generate_users_json.py script was used to create these profiles. The resulting profiles data file is bundled with the Retail Demo Store deployment. Therefore, you should not need to run the generate users script under normal conditions.

The reason why so many profiles are preloaded is to support the sample sizes needed to simulate experiements in the Experimentation workshops.

Local Development

The Users service can be built and run locally (in Docker) using Docker Compose. See the local development instructions for details. From the ../src directory, run the following command to build and deploy the service locally.

foo@bar:~$ docker compose up --build users

Once the container is up and running, you can access it in your browser or with a utility such as Postman at http://localhost:8002.

Testing

To run integration tests for the Users service a Python virtual environment is required. You must have Python 3.8+ installed on your system to run the commands below. The commands are written to be ran from the test directory of the Users service (src/users/test).

The following command will create a virtual environment.

python3 -m venv .venv

Some environment variables are required to run the tests and need to be added to the virtual environment. The example below will work for local development. Change as required depending on environment.

echo '
export USERS_API_URL="http://localhost:8002"
export TEST_USER_ID="1"
export TEST_USERNAME="user1"
export TEST_IDENTITY_ID="eu-west-1:12345678-1234-1234-1234-c777c9720775"
export TEST_PRIMARY_PERSONA="tools"
export TEST_AGE_RANGE="18-24"' >> .venv/bin/activate

To activate and enter the virtual environment.

source .venv/bin/activate

To install requirements for the integration tests.

pip install -r integ/requirements.txt

To run the tests.

pytest integ/test-users.py

You can exit the virtual environment with deactivate.

If you want to edit the request bodies for any of the PUT or POST request tests you can do so in json_request_bodies.json