1. cli
  2. CHANGES

The Nextstrain command-line tool, providing access to Nextstrain components in a local environment with a minimum of fuss.
Source code
github.com/nextstrain/cli
Contributors
tsibley
trvrb
ttung
jameshadfield
mlarrousse
Latest commits
Pages

NEXT

1.16.7 (20 May 2020)

Bug fixes

  • AWS Batch builds are now more resilient in the face of transient network or client errors when uploading the build directory and following build logs. Thanks Tony Tung!

1.16.6 (20 May 2020)

Bug fixes

  • The previous release did not pass mypy's type checks due to a technicality; mypy has now been placated.

Documentation

  • check-setup: Success or failure is (hopefully) more clearly messaged now. This was muddied over time by adding support for the native and AWS Batch runners, and we've seen several support requests because of confusion here.

  • Installation instructions in the README now document all supported computing environments, or "runners". Pipx is also mentioned as a nice alternative to Pip.

  • Detaching from AWS Batch builds with --detach and Control-Z is now mentioned in the AWS Batch documentation.

  • A direct reference to the AWS Batch User Guide on memory management details was added, because AWS docs can be hard to navigate.

  • The units documented to be used by the --aws-batch-memory option are now correct.

  • Runner-selection options (--docker, --native, --aws-batch) are now in their own option group to reduce clutter among the help output. They are only visible with --help-all now, like development options. With the use of nextstrain check-setup --set-default now emphasized, these options need not be as prominent.

  • The top-level description in nextstrain --help output now says more than three words. :D

1.16.5 (22 April 2020)

Features

  • build: AWS Batch jobs now require Ctrl-C to be pressed twice within 10s to cancel a job. This is an additional guard on top of 1.16.4's change so that if you accidentally press Ctrl-C once you can't accidentally press it again 30 minutes later and ruin your build.

1.16.4 (22 April 2020)

Features

  • build: AWS Batch jobs now require Ctrl-C to be pressed twice to cancel the job. This guards a potentially unwanted action from being used accidentally by requiring confirmation with a second Ctrl-C.

  • build: AWS Batch jobs now report the current job status when re-attaching. Previously the current job status was never reported, only the next status transition. For a PENDING or RUNNING job, it might be some time to the next transition.

1.16.3 (22 April 2020)

Features

  • build: AWS Batch jobs now include more detail about why the container exited when available. This surfaces useful messages like "OutOfMemoryError: Container killed due to memory usage" in addition to the exit status.

Documentation

  • check-setup: Describe how --set-default chooses an environment. Thanks Mary Larrousse!

Bug fixes

  • Fix missing import in our gzip utilities which could cause a runtime error (NameError) when running nextstrain remote download on S3 objects with a Content-Encoding header set to a value other than gzip or deflate. This circumstance is unlikely, but not impossible.

Development

  • Use Flake8 for static runtime safety and correctness checks

1.16.2 (16 March 2020)

Bug fixes

  • deploy/remote upload: Some files, but not all, were being truncated during upload due to a bug in gzip compression handling. Now the whole file makes it to its destination. More details in #62.

  • build: The default arguments for snakemake are no longer used if a different program to run is specified with --exec.

1.16.1 (25 February 2020)

Documentation

  • Update README to include the latest usage information, which mentions the new remote command.

1.16.0 (25 February 2020)

Features

  • The deploy command is now an alias for the remote upload command.

  • The new remote list, remote download, and remote delete commands allow listing, downloading, and deleting remote datasets and narratives which were uploaded using deploy / remote upload. Currently only direct s3:// destinations are supported, but its anticipated that Nextstrain Groups will be supported as first-class destinations in the future.

Bug fixes

  • deploy/remote upload: Invalid credentials are now properly caught and messaged about.

  • deploy/remote upload: Files are now deployed/uploaded using streaming compression instead of buffering the whole file in memory first.

1.15.0 (18 February 2020)

Features

  • Environment variables for AWS credentials (AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, and AWS_SESSION_TOKEN) are now passed through to builds. This lets builds which use data on S3 to work transparently, for example.

  • Environment variables for ID3C (ID3C_URL, ID3C_USERNAME, and ID3C_PASSWORD) are now passed through to builds. This lets Seattle Flu Study builds which use data in an ID3C instance to work transparently.

1.14.0 (24 September 2019)

No changes since 1.14.0b1, described below.

1.14.0b1 (17 September 2019)

Features

  • The build command now supports detaching from and re-attaching to builds run on AWS Batch (--aws-batch).

This adds a feature we've wanted from the beginning of the CLI. By starting the build with --detach, a remote job is submitted and the command necessary to --attach to the job later is printed. This command includes the job id and can be used as many times as desired, including while the remote job is running or after it has completed. It will even work on other computers or for other people, although you may need to modify the local build path to a directory of your choosing. The directory may be empty, in which case all build context will be restored there from the remote job.

AWS Batch builds may also be interactively detached by pressing Control-Z. Normally this would suspend a Unix process (which could then be resumed with fg or bg or SIGCONT), but in the same spirit, nextstrain build will detach from the remote job instead and exit the local process. This also parallels nicely with our existing Control-C job cancellation support.

There are currently no facilities to track job state locally or list outstanding jobs, but these features may be added later if it seems they'd be useful. As it stands with this new feature, one pattern for launching multiple detached jobs and picking them up later is:

  # Loop over several `nextstrain build` commands, appending the last
  # line to a shell script.
  nextstrain build --aws-batch --detach build-a/ | tail -n1 | tee -a pickup-jobs.sh
  nextstrain build --aws-batch --detach build-b/ | tail -n1 | tee -a pickup-jobs.sh
  …

  # Then, sometime later:
  bash pickup-jobs.sh
  • The --aws-batch runner for the build command no longer requires permission to perform the globally-scoped AWS IAM action s3:ListAllMyBuckets. Instead, it uses the HEAD <bucket> S3 API which requires either s3:ListBucket, which can be scoped to specific buckets in IAM grants, or s3:HeadBucket, which is globally-scoped but does not reveal bucket names. More details on these IAM actions are in the S3 documentation.

1.13.0 (10 September 2019)

Features

  • The deploy command no longer requires permission to perform the globally-scoped AWS IAM action s3:ListAllMyBuckets. Instead, it uses the HEAD <bucket> S3 API which requires either s3:ListBucket, which can be scoped to specific buckets in IAM grants, or s3:HeadBucket, which is globally-scoped but does not reveal bucket names. More details on these IAM actions are in the S3 documentation.

1.12.0 (5 September 2019)

Features

  • The deploy command now supports files other than JSON data files, such as Markdown narratives, by setting the correct content type on upload.

1.11.2 (3 September 2019)

Bug fixes

  • This release fixes a regression in the view command which caused "connection reset" or "empty response" errors. The regression only affected versions 1.11.0 and 1.11.1 of the Nextstrain CLI when used with Auspice 1.38.0 via the nextstrain/base:build-20190828T223744Z image. Thanks to Thomas Adams for the excellent bug report!

1.11.1 (30 August 2019)

Bug fixes

  • The check-setup command no longer errors when Docker isn't installed.

1.11.0 (30 August 2019)

Features

  • The view command now supports --native flag to run in the native ambient environment.

  • The check-setup command now supports a --set-default flag to save the first supported environment to the Nextstrain CLI's config file. This means that you don't have to specify --native (or --aws-batch) every time if you don't have/want Docker support.

Bug fixes

  • The --verbose flag to the version command will no longer cause the Docker image to be downloaded when it isn't available locally.

Documentation

  • Describe the somewhat annoying process of how to increase the disk space available to AWS Batch jobs in the AWS Web Console.

1.10.2 (23 August 2019)

Bug fixes

1.10.1 (26 March 2019)

Features

  • The view command now sports a --port option to use an alternate port for the viewer.

1.10.0 (22 February 2019)

Features

  • Add ability to specify vCPU and memory when running AWS Batch jobs via --aws-batch-cpus and --aws-batch-memory or via specification in ~/.nextstrain/config or via environment variables NEXTSTRAIN_AWS_BATCH_CPUS and NEXTSTRAIN_AWS_BATCH_MEMORY. This requires corresponding proper setup of compute environment in AWS Batch console.

1.9.1 (11 February 2019)

Features

  • Restore the modification times of files when unzipping results from an AWS Batch run. This allows Snakemake's dependency resolution to properly determine file staleness, which in turn allows local builds to continue where AWS Batch builds leave off (e.g. running the bulk of the computation on AWS Batch and then iterating on subsequent trivial steps locally).

1.9.0 (8 February 2019)

Features

  • Builds run on AWS Batch no longer delete the build dir zip file from S3 or the job log stream from CloudWatch, making it easier to debug and troubleshoot Batch builds. The Batch setup documentation is updated to note that the previously suggested retention policies are now the only thing preventing runaway data storage costs (and thus a must).

Bug fixes

  • Declare missing dep on setuptools, used via pkg_resources by the check-setup and update commands. setuptools nearly always exists already on Python installs, especially when nextstrain-cli is installed using pip, but nearly always is not always.

Development

  • Static type checking now passes again thanks to a work around for a mypy bug related to namespace packages.

1.8.1 (21 January 2019)

Features

  • The check-setup command now tests if the local Docker image is new enough for this version of the CLI.

1.8.0 (18 January 2019)

Bug fixes

  • Docker images between build-20190115T232255Z and build-20190116T000613Z (inclusive) broke the nextstrain view command. It is fixed in this version of the CLI, 1.8.0, in tandem with new images, starting with build-20190119T045444Z. If your view command is broken, running nextstrain update and following the instructions to upgrade to version 1.8.0 of the CLI should resolve the issue.

  • AWS Batch builds now avoid uploading files matching environment* in the build directory, as such files are commonly used for storing sensitive environment values.

1.7.3 (28 December 2018)

Features

  • The automatic check for newer versions of the CLI, which happens on the update and check-setup commands, now produces a better, more-likely-to-work suggested invocation of pip to perform the upgrade.

1.7.2 (28 December 2018)

Features

  • The build command now runs snakemake with the --printshellcmds option for improved log output.

Bug fixes

  • User-provided paths are now resolved strictly—they must exist—on both Python 3.5 and ≥3.6, not just 3.5. This discrepancy was unlikely to result in any noticeable problems because of other existence checks which were performed. Nevertheless, the change is good housekeeping and helps ensure robustness.

  • The update command no longer errors on Python 3.6.0 and 3.6.1 when the ~/.nextstrain/ does not exist (for example, when upgrading from CLI versions before 1.7.0). #37

Development

  • Continuous integration testing now includes a much fuller range of Python versions in order to more quickly catch bugs like the one affecting update above.

  • Continuous integration testing switched to running the zika-tutorial, a simplified build more suitable for our needs.

1.7.1 (5 December 2018)

Bug fixes

  • The shell command no longer throws an unexpected exception about a missing warn() function when a non-existent build directory is given. The user-friendly error is printed instead, as expected.

1.7.0 (26 November 2018)

Features

  • Builds can now be run remotely on AWS Batch by passing the --aws-batch flag to the build command. See nextstrain build --help for more information. Setup required to support this is documented in doc/aws-batch.md.

  • The update command now pulls down new images by their build-* tag instead of tracking the mutable latest tag. Our build tags are, most importantly, not updated after creation and thus are suitable references for reproducible runs. The output of nextstrain version --verbose now includes the specific build tag.

  • The check-setup command now tests the amount of memory available to containers and warns if it less than 2GB. This is particularly important on Windows and macOS where Linux containers are run inside a VM on the host. The VM may have limited memory allocated to it, leading to out-of-memory errors in builds.

Documentation

  • Installation instructions in the README are now more detailed.

  • A big picture overview of where the CLI fits into the Nextstrain ecosystem is included in the README for situating newcomers.

  • The README now refers to Docker Desktop, the new name for Docker Community Edition.

1.6.1 (25 September 2018)

Features

  • The shell command announces you're entering the build environment, prints information about mapped volumes, and describes how to leave the environment.

1.6.0 (18 September 2018)

Bug fixes

  • On Windows, fix an issue where the build and shell commands spawn the docker run process but also immediately return the user to the command-line. For shell, the situation was weirder still because the user ended up with two command prompts (cmd.exe and bash) but only one appeared to win when reading from the shared stdin.

1.5.0 (4 September 2018)

Features

  • The build command now supports a --native flag to run the build outside of any container image, that is, within the ambient environment. That environment might be provided by conda or a cluster module system or custom installs or some other thing. Docker remains the default, although it may be explicitly specified with --docker. Other runners are planned for the future. The idea is that the cli as a user-facing tool for Nextstrain is separate from a containerized Nextstrain environment (although the two work well together).

  • The build, view, and shell commands now show an abbreviated set of common options when passed --help. The full set of options is available using --help-all. The idea is to make the initial output more approachable.

Development

  • The README now describes how to annotate the type of variable and use other typing features in a way that's compatible with Python 3.5

  • Package metadata for PyPi is slightly improved.

1.4.1 (11 August 2018)

Documentation

  • Minor updates to README and command help strings

1.4.0 (9 August 2018)

Features

  • A new shell command launches an interactive shell (bash) inside the build environment, which is useful for running ad-hoc commands and debugging.

1.3.0 (9 August 2018)

Features

  • The update command now prunes old Docker images after downloading new ones. This functionality relies on our new, labeled images. Older images will have to be manually pruned as a one-time step. See docker image prune for more information. Note that locally built images which are tagged nextstrain/base:latest will be pruned when update is run. Protect such images by giving them an additional tag.

  • The versions of the Docker image and individual Nextstrain components in the image are shown when the version command is run with the --verbose flag.

1.2.0 (1 August 2018)

Features

  • A new deploy command supports uploading data files to S3, allowing the complete pathogen build lifecycle to happen using this package.

  • The check-setup and update commands now check if the CLI itself is out of date and could be updated.

Documentation

  • Brief descriptions of the changes in each release are now kept in the CHANGES.md file. You're reading it!

Development

  • Describe basic development practices for this package in the README.

  • Commit to semantic versioning, which I'd been neglecting previously when bumping versions.

  • Static type checking is now supported for a small fraction of the source code and runs clean under mypy. This is included in Travis CI testing. The goal is to add more type annotations going forward.