Question: Development Environment

General Question - Not an issue

What's your development environment for this look like, what's the debugging workflow, what tools you use, etc...

When looking into pigskin in the past I just wrote a small script to call it while passing traffic through a fiddler proxy to view the output but it's harder when you're trying to debug the actual addon logic.

My initial attempt at a dev environment is just leaving me with a "there's got to be a better way" feeling

Setup

Windows Host
Setup Ubuntu Kodi VM in Virtual Box
Host edits Sublime + SublimeSimpleSync
Kodi edits with vim
SSH sessions through putty

User profile aliases for log file tail, kodi restart, etc...

alias LOG='tail -F /home/kodi/.kodi/temp/kodi.log'
alias LOGE='vi /home/kodi/.kodi/temp/kodi.log'
alias RESTART='killall -HUP kodi.bin'

Start addon via json-rpc

curl --data-binary '{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "Addons.ExecuteAddon", "params": { "addonid": "plugin.video.nfl.gamepass"}, "id": 1 }' -H 'content-type: application/json;' http://localhost:8080/jsonrpc

Workflow

Make a change in vim or host sublime
Start addon via rpc
Monitor log in SSH session
Rinse and repeat

References

My initial attempt at a dev environment is just leaving me with a "there's got to be a better way" feeling

When working with Kodi, that's definitely the case. I work on Linux, so I don't have the working-remotely setup you have. But what I do is:

kodi running
tail -f ~/.kodi/temp/kodi.log
vim default.py

Whenever I make edits, I exit the addon and re-open it.

That's for Kodi, and I don't know of any better workflow.

However, more and more logic is being moved to pigskin, and I have put a lot of effort recently into making it actually functional standalone --- and adding tests. Unless you're working on integration with Kodi, chances are good you only need pigskin, and for that I recommend that you look at the aqw/pigskin repo.

For pigskin, my setup is a bit different:

I setup a python virtualenv with python3 and all my required deps
pytest should run cleanly
I edit my tests and pigskin as needed, and can repeatedly run pytest without actually contacting Game Pass's servers (vcr.py FTW) --- unless, of course, I've changed what the actual HTTP request is. Then the corresponding "cassette" needs to be updated.
for sniffing, I just use Chrome's devtools. Everyone kinda has their own favorite tool here (fiddler, wireshark, etc).
I also have an ipython instance open. Once I've identified the server and params from devtools, I open a request in ipython and start playing with the returned data. This gives me a better idea of how I want to actually write the function in pigskin.py.

Once everything is committed to the pigskin project and passing the travis tests, then I cherry-pick the changes into xbmc-gamepass.

I hope that's enough info to give you some insight. Let me know if I can share any more info.

This stuff really should be documented, once I get docs going -- hopefully soonish.

pigskin / kodi-gamepass