Steep 5.3.0 has been released

A new minor ver­sion of my work­flow man­age­ment sys­tem Steep is now avail­able. The most not­able changes in ver­sion 5.3.0 are the de­prec­a­tion of the ar­gu­ment type argument in the pro­cess chain model and ser­vice metadata as well as the de­prec­a­tion of parameters of ex­ecute ac­tions in the work­flow model. Both prop­er­ties were mostly un­ne­ces­sary. The ar­gu­ment type argument should be changed to input, and parameters of ex­ecute ac­tions should be merged into their inputs.

This change is com­pletely back­wards com­pat­ible. Steep will auto­mat­ic­ally modify pos­ted work­flows and the con­figured ser­vice metadata. It will is­sue a warn­ing in the log file if it en­coun­ters de­prec­ated prop­er­ties. You should mi­grate to the new ones as soon as pos­sible as the de­prec­ated ones will be re­moved in Steep 6.0.0 or with the work­flow API 5.0.0.

Ex­ist­ing work­flows and pro­cess chains in your data­base will auto­mat­ic­ally be mi­grated to the new model if ne­ces­sary.

Steep 5.3.0 also comes with a few other im­prove­ments and fixes (see com­plete list be­low). The ver­sion has been thor­oughly tested in prac­tice over the last couple of months.

Steep is a sci­entific work­flow man­age­ment sys­tem that can ex­ecute data-driven work­flows in the Cloud. It is very well suited to har­ness the pos­sib­il­it­ies of dis­trib­uted com­put­ing in or­der to par­al­lel­ise work and to speed up your data pro­cessing work­flows no mat­ter how com­plex they are and re­gard­less of how much data you need to pro­cess. Steep is an open-source soft­ware de­veloped at Fraunhofer IGD. You can down­load the bin­ar­ies and the source code of Steep from its Git­Hub re­pos­it­ory.

New features

• Al­low sep­ar­ate SSH user­names per setup to be con­figured
• Al­low ad­di­tional en­vir­on­ment vari­ables to be con­figured that will be passed to con­tain­ers cre­ated by the Docker runtime
• Add val­id­ator that checks for com­mon mis­takes in pos­ted work­flows. In­valid work­flows will be re­jec­ted with HTTP status code 400.
• Use new web UI by de­fault. The old UI is now de­prec­ated and will be re­moved in one of the next ver­sions.
• De­prec­ate ac­tion para­met­ers and ser­vice ar­gu­ments:
  • Para­met­ers of ex­ecute ac­tions are ac­tu­ally un­ne­ces­sary be­cause they have the same struc­ture as in­puts. I’ve de­cided to de­prec­ate para­met­ers. They will be re­moved in Steep 6.0.0. In the mean­time, para­met­ers of an ex­ecute ac­tion in a pos­ted work­flow will auto­mat­ic­ally be merged into its in­puts. A warn­ing will be logged.
  • The same ap­plies to ser­vice para­met­ers with the type argument. They are un­ne­ces­sary be­cause they can be eas­ily mapped to in­puts. I’ve de­prec­ated the type argument and will re­move it in Steep 6.0.0. For the time be­ing, argument will auto­mat­ic­ally be re­placed by input in your services.yaml file. A warn­ing will be logged.
• Add data­base mi­gra­tion to re­move de­prec­ated data model prop­er­ties. This will re­name the ar­gu­ment type argument in pro­cess chains to input and merge parameters of ex­ecute ac­tions into their inputs.

Maintenance

• Bump lo­dash from 4.17.15 to 4.17.19

Bug fixes

• Pre­vent du­plic­ate setup IDs
• Do not throw ex­cep­tion in NotifyingSubmissionRegistry if VM does not ex­ist
• Up­date web­socket-ex­ten­sions to 0.1.4
• Fix po­s­i­tion of text in drop­down but­ton