Easy provenance reporting

Easy provenance reports

When provided with a run name or session ID, the log command can return useful information about a pipeline execution. This can be composed to track the provenance of a workflow result.

When supplying a run name or session ID, the log command lists all the work directories used to compute the final result. For example:

Using the option -f (fields) it’s possible to specify which metadata should be printed by the log command. For example:

The complete list of available fields can be retrieved with the command:

The option -F allows the specification of filtering criteria to print only a subset of tasks. For example:

This can be useful to locate specific tasks work directories.

Finally, the -t option allows for the creation of a basic custom HTML provenance report that can be generated by providing a template file, in any format of your choice. For example:

By saving the above snippet in a file named template.html, you can run the following command:

Open it in your browser, et voilà!

Conclusion

This post introduces a little know Nextflow feature and it's intended to show how it can be used to produce a custom execution report reporting some - basic - provenance information.

In future releases we plan to support a more formal provenance specification and execution tracking features.