The AirBnB clone.

HolbertonBnB is a complete web application, integrating database storage, a back-end API, and front-end interface in a clone of AirBnB.

This team project is part of the ALX Software Engineering program.
It represents the first step towards building a full web application.

This first step consists of:

• A custom command-line interface for data management,
• The base classes for the storage of this data.

• models directory contains all classes used for the entire project. A class, called “model” in a OOP project is the representation of an object/instance.
• tests directory contains all unit tests.
• console.py is the entry point of our command interpreter.
• models/base_model.py is the base class of all our models. It contains common elements:
  • attributes: id, created_at and updated_at
  • methods: save() and to_json()
• models/engine directory contains all storage classes (using the same prototype). For the moment it has only one: file_storage.py.

The first phase is to manipulate a powerful storage system to give an abstraction between objects and how they are stored and persisted. To achieve this we :

• put in place a parent class (called BaseModel) to take care of the initialization, serialization and deserialization of future instances
• create a simple flow of serialization/deserialization: Instance <-> Dictionary <-> JSON string <-> file
• create all classes used for AirBnB (User, State, City, Place…) that inherit from BaseModel .
• create the first abstracted storage engine of the project: File storage.
• create all unittests to validate all classes and storage engine.
• Manage (create, update, destroy, etc....) objects via a console/command interpreter
• Store and persist objects to files (JSON files).

The console works both in interactive mode and non-interactive mode, much like a Unix shell. It prints a prompt (hbnb) and waits for the user for input.

Unittests for the HolbertonBnB project are defined in the tests folder. To run the entire test suite simultaneously, execute the following command:

$ python3 unittest -m discover tests