trick/docs/documentation/miscellaneous_trick_tools/TrickOps.md

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Table of Contents

• Requirements
• Features
• The YAML File
• Learn by Example
• File Comparisons
• Post-Run Analysis
• Where does my output go?
• Other Useful Examples
• The TrickOps Design
• Tips & Best Practices

TrickOps

TrickOps is shorthand for "Trick Operations", and is a python3 framework that provides an easy-to-use interface for common testing and workflow actions that Trick simulation developers and users often run repeatedly. Good software developer workflows typically have a script or set of scripts that the developer can run to answer the question "have I broken anything?". The purpose of TrickOps is to provide the logic central to managing these tests while allowing each project to define how and and what they wish to test. Don't reinvent the wheel, use TrickOps!

TrickOps is not a GUI, it's a set of python modules that you can import that let you build a testing framework for your Trick-based project with just a few lines of python code.

Requirements

python version 3.X and the packages in requirements.txt are required to use TrickOps. Virtual environments make this easy, see the python documentation on virtual environments for information on how to create a python3 virtual environment using the requirements.txt file included here.

Features

TrickOps provides the following features:

1. Multiple simultaneous sim builds, runs (with or without valgrind), logged data file comparisons, and post-run analyses
2. Automatic project environment file sourcing
3. Real-time progress bars for sim builds and runs with in-terminal curses interface
4. Exit code management lets users easily define success & failure criteria
5. Failed comparisons can optionally generate koviz error reports
6. Sims, their runs, comparisons, etc. are defined in a single easy-to-read YAML file which TrickOps reads

The YAML File

The YAML file is a required input to the framework which defines all of the tests your project cares about. This is literally a list of sims, each of which may contain runs, each run may contain comparisons and post-run analyses and so on. Here's a very simple example YAML file for a project with two sims, each having one run:

SIM_spacecraft:
  path: sims/SIM_spacecraft
  runs:
    RUN_test/input.py:
      returns: 0

SIM_visiting_vehicle:
  path: sims/SIM_visiting_vehicle
  runs:
    RUN_test/input.py:
      returns: 0

Simple and readable, this config file is parsed by PyYAML and adheres to all normal YAML syntactical rules. Additionally the Trick-Workflow expected convention for defining sims, runs, comparisons, etc. is described in the TrickWorkflow docstrings and also summarized in detail below:

globals:
  env:                 <-- optional literal string executed before all tests, e.g. env setup
  parallel_safety:     <-- <loose|strict> strict won't allow multiple input files per RUN dir

SIM_abc:               <-- required unique name for sim of interest, must start with SIM
  path:                <-- required SIM path relative to project top level
  description:         <-- optional description for this sim
  labels:              <-- optional list of labels for this sim, can be used to get sims
      - model_x            by label within the framework, or for any other project-defined
      - verification       purpose
  build_command:       <-- optional literal cmd executed for SIM_build, defaults to trick-CP
  size:                <-- optional estimated size of successful build output file in bytes
  runs:                <-- optional dict of runs to be executed for this sim, where the
    RUN_1/input.py --foo:  dict keys are the literal arguments passed to the sim binary
    RUN_2/input.py:        and the dict values are other run-specific optional dictionaries
    ...                    described as follows ...
      returns: <int>   <---- optional exit code of this run upon completion (0-255). Defaults
                             to 0
      compare:         <---- optional list of <path> vs. <path> comparison strings to be
        - a vs. b            compared after this run is complete. This is extensible in that
        - d vs. e            all non-list values are ignored and assumed to be used to define
        - ...                an alternate comparison method in derived classes
      analyze:         <-- optional arbitrary string to execute as job in bash shell from
                           project top level, for project-specific post-run analysis
  valgrind:            <-- optional dict describing how to execute runs within valgrind
    flags:             <-- string of all flags passed to valgrind for all runs
    runs:              <-- list of literal arguments passed to the sim binary through
      - RUN_1...           valgrind

non_sim_extension_example:
  will: be ignored by TrickWorkflow parsing for derived classes to implement as they wish

Almost everything in this file is optional, but there must be at least one top-level key that starts with SIM and it must contain a valid path: <path/to/SIM...> with respect to the top level directory of your project. Here, SIM_abc represents "any sim" and the name is up to the user, but it must begin with SIM since TrickWorkflow purposefully ignores any top-level key not beginning with SIM in order to allow for extensibility of the YAML file for non-sim tests specific to a project.

There is no limit to number of SIMs, runs:, compare: lists, valgrind runs: list, etc. This file is intended to contain every Sim and and every sim's run, and every run's comparison and so on that your project cares about. Remember, this file represents the pool of tests, not necessarily what must be tested every time your scripts which use it run.

Learn TrickOps with an Example Workflow that uses this Trick Repository

Included in TrickOps is ExampleWorkflow.py, which sets up a simple "build all sims, run all runs" testing script in less than 20 lines of code! It clones the Trick repo from https://github.com/nasa/trick.git, writes a YAML file describing the sims and runs to test, then uses TrickOps to build sims and run runs in parallel. To see it in action, simply run the script:

cd trick/share/trick/trickops/
./ExampleWorkflow.py

When running, you should see output that looks like this:

When running, you'll notice that tests occur in two phases. First, sims build in parallel up to three at a time. Then when all builds complete, sims run in parallel up to three at a time. Progress bars show how far along each build and sim run is at any given time. The terminal window will accept scroll wheel and arrow input to view current builds/runs that are longer than the terminal height.

Looking inside the script, the code at top of the script creates a yaml file containing a large portion of the sims and runs that ship with trick and writes it to /tmp/config.yml. This config file will be input to the framework. At the bottom of the script is where the magic happens, this is where the TrickOps modules are used:

from TrickWorkflow import *
class ExampleWorkflow(TrickWorkflow):
    def __init__( self, quiet, trick_top_level='/tmp/trick'):
        # Real projects already have trick somewhere, but for this test, just clone it
        if not os.path.exists(trick_top_level):
          os.system('cd %s && git clone https://github.com/nasa/trick' % (os.path.dirname(trick_top_level)))
        # Base Class initialize, this creates internal management structures
        TrickWorkflow.__init__(self, project_top_level=trick_top_level, log_dir='/tmp/',
            trick_dir=trick_top_level, config_file="/tmp/config.yml", cpus=3, quiet=quiet)
    def run( self):
      build_jobs      = self.get_jobs(kind='build')
      run_jobs        = self.get_jobs(kind='run')

      builds_status = self.execute_jobs(build_jobs, max_concurrent=3, header='Executing all sim builds.')
      runs_status   = self.execute_jobs(run_jobs,   max_concurrent=3, header='Executing all sim runs.')
      self.report()           # Print Verbose report
      self.status_summary()   # Print a Succinct summary
      return (builds_status or runs_status or self.config_errors)
if __name__ == "__main__":
    sys.exit(ExampleWorkflow(quiet=(True if len(sys.argv) > 1 and 'quiet' in sys.argv[1] else False)).run())

Let's look at a few key parts of the example script. Here, we create a new class arbitrarily named ExampleWorkflow which inherits from TrickWorkflow, which is a class provided by the TrickWorkflow.py module. As part of its class setup, it clones a new trick repo from GitHub and places it in /tmp/. Since '/tmp/trick' provides many example sims and runs, we eat our own dogfood here and use it to represent our project_top_level for example purposes.

from TrickWorkflow import *
class ExampleWorkflow(TrickWorkflow):
    def __init__( self, quiet, trick_top_level='/tmp/trick'):
        # Real projects already have trick somewhere, but for this test, just clone it
        if not os.path.exists(trick_top_level):
          os.system('cd %s && git clone https://github.com/nasa/trick' % (os.path.dirname(trick_top_level)))

Our new class ExampleWorkflow.py can be initialized however we wish as long as it provides the necessary arguments to it's Base class initializer. In this example, __init__ takes two parameters: trick_top_level which defaults to /tmp/trick, and quiet which will be False unless quiet is found in the command-line args to this script. The magic happens on the very next line where we call the base-class TrickWorkflow initializer which accepts four required parameters:

        TrickWorkflow.__init__(self, project_top_level=trick_top_level, log_dir='/tmp/',
            trick_dir=trick_top_level, config_file="/tmp/config.yml", cpus=3, quiet=quiet)

The required parameters are described as follows:

• project_top_level is the absolute path to the highest-level directory of your project. The "top level" is up to the user to define, but usually this is the top level of your repository and at minimum must be a directory from which all sims, runs, and other files used in your testing are recursively reachable.
• log_dir is a path to a user-chosen directory where all logging for all tests will go. This path will be created for you if it doesn't already exist.
• trick_dir is an absolute path to the top level directory for the instance of trick used for your project. For projects that use trick as a git submodule, this is usually <project_top_level>/trick
• config_file is the path to a YAML config file describing the sims, runs, etc. for your project. It's recommended this file be tracked in your SCM tool but that is not required. More information on the syntax expected in this file in the The YAML File section below.

The optional parameters are described as follows:

• cpus tells the framework how many CPUs to use on sim builds. This translates directly to MAKEFLAGS and is separate from the maximum number of simultaneous sim builds.
• quiet tells the framework to suppress progress bars and other verbose output. It's a good idea to use quiet=True if your scripts are going to be run in a continuous integration (CI) testing framework such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkins, because it suppresses all curses logic during job execution which itself expects stdin to exist.

When TrickWorkflow initializes, it reads the config_file and verifies the information given matches the expected convention. If a non-fatal error is encountered, a message detailing the error is printed to stdout and the internal timestamped log file under log_dir. A fatal error will raise RuntimeError.

Moving on to the next important lines of code in our ExampleWorkflow.py script. The def run(self): line declares a function whose return code on run is passed back to the calling shell via sys.exit(). This is where we use the functions given to us by inherting from TrickWorkflow:

      build_jobs      = self.get_jobs(kind='build')
      run_jobs        = self.get_jobs(kind='run')
      builds_status   = self.execute_jobs(build_jobs, max_concurrent=3, header='Executing all sim builds.')
      runs_status     = self.execute_jobs(run_jobs,   max_concurrent=3, header='Executing all sim runs.')

These four lines of code will build all simulations in our config file in parallel up to three at once, followed by running all simulation runs in parallel up to three at once. The get_jobs() function is the easiest way to get a set of jobs from the pool of jobs we defined in our config file of a certain kind. It will return a list of Job instances matching the kind given. For example build_jobs = self.get_jobs(kind='build') means "give me a list of every job which builds a simulation defined in my config file". These Job instances can then be passed as a list to the execute_jobs() function which manages their execution and collection of their return codes and output. execute_jobs will start the list of Jobs given to it, running a maximum of max_concurrent at a time, and returns 0 (False) if all jobs success, 1 (True) if any job failed. kind can be: 'build', 'run', 'valgrind', or 'analysis'.

The last three lines simply print a detailed report of what was executed and manage the exit codes so that ExampleWorkflow.py's return code can be trusted to report pass/fail status to the calling shell in the typical linux style: zero on success, non-zero on failure.

      self.report()           # Print Verbose report
      self.status_summary()   # Print a Succinct summary
      return (builds_status or runs_status or self.config_errors)

The ExampleWorkflow.py uses sims/runs provided by trick to exercise some of the functionality provided by TrickOps. This script does not have any comparisons, post-run analyses, or valgrind runs defined in the YAML file, so there is no execution of those tests in this example.

compare: - File vs. File Comparisons

In the TrickWorkflow base class, a "comparison" is an easy way to compare two logged data files via an md5sum compare. Many sim workflows generate logged data when their sims run and want to compare that logged data to a stored off baseline (a.k.a regression) version of that file to answer the question: "has my sim response changed?". TrickOps makes it easy to execute these tests by providing a compare() function at various levels of the architecture which returns 0 (False) on success and 1 (True) if the files do not match.

In the YAML file, the compare: section under a specific run: key defines the comparison the user is interested in. For example consider this YAML file:

SIM_ball:
    path: path/to/SIM_ball
    runs:
      RUN_foo/input.py:
      RUN_test/input.py:
        compare:
          - path/to/SIM_/ball/RUN_test/log_a.csv vs. regression/SIM_ball/log_a.csv
          - path/to/SIM_/ball/RUN_test/log_b.trk vs. regression/SIM_ball/log_b.trk

In this example, SIM_ball's run RUN_foo/input.py doesn't have any comparisons, but RUN_test/input.py contains two comparisons, each of which compares data generated by the execution of RUN_test/input.py to a stored off version of the file under the regression/ directory relative to the top level of the project. The comparisons themselves can be executed in your python script via the compare() function in multiple ways. For example:

# Assuming we're in a python script using TrickWorkflow as a base class and RUN_test/input.py
# has already been executed locally so that logged data exists on disk...

# OPTION 1: Execute compare() at the top level of TrickWorkflow
ret = self.compare()          # Execute all comparisons for all runs across all sims

# OPTION 2: Get the sim you care about and execute compare() on only that sim
s = self.get_sim('SIM_ball')  # Get the sim we care about
ret = s.compare()             # Execute all comparisons for all runs in 'SIM_ball'

# OPTION 3: Get the run you care about and execute compare() at the run level
r = self.get_sim('SIM_ball').get_run('RUN_test/input.py')
ret = r.compare()             # Execute all comparisons for run 'RUN_test/input.py'

In all three of these options, ret will be 0 (False) if all comparisons succeeded and 1 (True) if at least one comparison failed. You may have noticed the get_jobs() function does not accept kind='comparison'. This is because comparisons are not Job instances. Use compare() to execute comparisons and get_jobs() with execute_jobs() for builds, run, analyses, etc.

Koviz Utility Functions

When a comparison fails, usually the developer's next step is to look at the differences in a plotting tool. TrickOps provides an interface to koviz, which lets you quickly and easily generate error plot PDFs when a set of comparisons fail. This requires that the koviz binary be on your user PATH and that your koviz version is newer than 4/1/2021. Here are a couple examples of how to do this:

# Assuming we're in a python script using TrickWorkflow as a base class and have
# executed a compare() which has failed...

# OPTION 1: Get all koviz report jobs for all failed comparisons in your YAML file
(koviz_jobs, failures) = self.get_koviz_report_jobs()
# Execute koviz jobs to generate the error plots, up to four at once
if not failures:
  self.execute_jobs(koviz_jobs, max_concurrent=4, header='Generating koviz error plots')

# OPTION 2: Get a single koviz report job by providing two directories to have koviz compare
(krj, failure) = self.get_koviz_report_job('path/to/test_data/', 'path/to/baseline_data/')
if not failure:
  self.execute_jobs([krj], header='Generating koviz error plots')

If an error is encountered, like koviz or a given directory cannot be found, None is returned in the first index of the tuple, and the error information is returned in the second index of the tuple for get_koviz_report_job(). The get_koviz_report_jobs() function just wraps the singular call and returns a tuple of ( list_of_jobs, list_of_any_failures ). Note that koviz accepts entire directories as input, not specific paths to files. Keep this in mind when you organize how regression data is stored and how logged data is generated by your runs.

analyze: - Post-Run Analysis

The optional analyze: section of a run: is intended to be a catch-all for "post-run analysis". The string given will be transformed into a Job() instance that can be retrieved and executed via execute_jobs() just like any other test. All analyze jobs are assumed to return 0 on success, non-zero on failure. One example use case for this would be creating a jupytr notebook that contains an analysis of a particular run.

Where does the output of my tests go?

All output goes to a single directory log_dir, which is a required input to the TrickWorkflow.__init__() function. Sim builds, runs, comparisons, koviz reports etc. are all put in a single directory with unique names. This is purposeful for two reasons:

1. When a failure occurs, the user can always find verbose output in the same place
2. Easy integration into CI artifact collection mechanisms. Just collect log_dir to get all verbose output for successful and failed tests alike.

Logging for the TrickWorfklow itself, including a list of all executed tests will automatically be created in <log_dir>/log.<timestamp>.txt

Other Useful Examples

# Assuming you are within the scope of a class inheriting from TrickWorkflow ...
self.report()                  # Report colorized verbose information regarding the pool of tests
s = self.status_summary()      # Print a succinct summary regarding the pool of tests
myvar = self.config['myvar'])  # Access custom key 'myvar' in YAML file
tprint("My important msg")     # Print to the screen and log a message internally
# Define my own custom job and run it using execute_jobs()
myjob = Job(name='my job', command='sleep 10', log_file='/tmp/out.txt', expected_exit_status=0)
self.execute_jobs([myjob])

Regarding the Design: Why do I have to write my own script?

You may be thinking, "sure it’s great that it only takes a few lines of python code to use this framework, but why isn’t TrickOps just a generic cmdline interface that I can use? Why isn't it just this?":

./trickops --config project_config.yml

This is purposeful -- handling every project-specific constraint is impossible. Here's a few examples of project-specific constraints that make a generic catch-all ./trickops script very difficult to implement:

• "I want to fail testing on SIM_a, but SIM_b build is allowed to fail!"
  • Solution: Project-specific script defines success with sys.exit(<my_critera>)
• "I need to add project-specific key-value pairs in the YAML file!"
  • Solution: Project specific script reads self.config to get these
• "I don’t want to use koviz, I want to generate errors plots with matlab!"
  • Solution: Project specific script extends class Comparison
• "I have a pre-sim-build mechanism (like matlab) that complicates everything!"
  • Solution: Project specific script runs execute_jobs() on custom Jobs before normal sim builds are executed

Tips & Best Practices

• Commit your YAML file to your project. What gets tested will change over time, you want to track those changes.
• If your project requires an environment, it's usually a good idea to track a source-able environment file that users can execute in their shell. For example, if myproject/.bashrc contains your project environment, you should add source .bashrc ; to the env: section of globals in your YAML config file. This tells TrickWorkflow to add source .bashrc ; before every Job()'s command.
• Make sure you execute your tests in an order that makes sense logically. The TrickOps framework will not automatically execute a sim build before a sim run for example, it's on the user to define the order in which tests run and which tests are important to them.
• Be cognizant of how many CPUs you've passed into TricKWorkflow.__init__ and how many sims you build at once. Each sim build will use the cpus given to TrickWorkflow.__init__, so if you are building 3 sims at once each with 3 cpus you're technically requesting 9 cpus worth of build, so to speak.
• If TrickWorkflow encounters non-fatal errors while validating the content of the given YAML config file, it will set the internal member self.config_erros to be True. If you want your script to return non-zero on any non-fatal error, add this return code to your final script sys.exit().
• Treat the YAML file like your project owns it. You can store project-specific information and retrieve that information in your scripts by accessing the self.config dictionary. Anything not recognized by the internal validation of the YAML file is ignored, but that information is still provided to the user. For example, if you wanted to store a list of POCS in your YAML file so that your script could print a helpful message on error, simply add a new entry project_pocs: email1, email2... and then access that information via self.config['project_pocs'] in your script.

More Information

A lot of time was spent adding python docstrings to the TrickWorkflow.py and WorkflowCommon.py modules. This README does not cover all functionality, so please see the in-code documentation for more detailed information on the framework.

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