orderly bundles

Overview

In order to use orderly bundles we make some assumptions and conventions.

First, we assume that you will be running your exported report on another machine (otherwise you would have access to the orderly tree) and that your report takes really quite a long time.

Second, we assume you have your own way of getting the bundled reports to your other machine and the completed bundles back again — we expect that the details here will be specific to your needs and situation and that the overhead of doing this will be trivial compared with the cost of running the report.

Third, we assume that you will deal with all issues around queuing, locking and fault tolerance. From orderly’s point of view work will be exported from orderly and at this point you’re in control - we expect it to come back computed at some point, though we do not enforce that.

Fourth, that the machine running the report can be trusted to actually run the report - if you have set up an orderly server that is safe from interactively run reports, don’t allow importing from anyone’s laptops if you want to preserve this.

Fifth, that you trust your remote machine with your data, and that the remote machine trusts your orderly archive enough to run arbitrary code on it.

The process

We will use the orderly demo example, and pack up the use_dependency report.

path <- orderly::orderly_example("demo")

The use_dependency report has a dependency, which we run

id <- orderly::orderly_run("other", parameters = list(nmin = 0),
                           echo = FALSE, root = path)

## [ name       ]  other

## [ id         ]  20241112-024144-5d6942b8

## [ sources    ]  functions.R

## [ parameter  ]  nmin: 0

## [ start      ]  2024-11-12 02:41:44.38681

## [ data       ]  source => extract: 20 x 2

## [ parameter  ]  nmin: 0

## [ end        ]  2024-11-12 02:41:44.461808

## [ elapsed    ]  Ran report in 0.07499766 secs

## [ artefact   ]  summary.csv: 3fac8347e152c84c96e6676413c718b7
## [ ...        ]  graph.png: 67b3e662440b3978ee78b9d4cc159884

orderly::orderly_commit(id, root = path)

## [ commit     ]  other/20241112-024144-5d6942b8

## [ copy       ]

## [ import     ]  other:20241112-024144-5d6942b8

## [ success    ]  :)

## [1] "/tmp/RtmpRuo440/filed6b402ea67/archive/other/20241112-024144-5d6942b8"

We need a place that we’ll put the bundles:

path_bundles <- tempfile()

Now, we can pack up use_dependency to run

bundle <- orderly::orderly_bundle_pack(path_bundles, "use_dependency",
                                       root = path)

## [ name       ]  use_dependency

## [ id         ]  20241112-024144-c52e793e

## [ depends    ]  other@20241112-024144-5d6942b8:summary.csv -> incoming.csv

## [ start      ]  2024-11-12 02:41:44.773338

## [ bundle pack ]  20241112-024144-c52e793e

bundle

## $id
## [1] "20241112-024144-c52e793e"
## 
## $path
## [1] "/tmp/RtmpRuo440/filed6b6755e9bc/20241112-024144-c52e793e.zip"

orderly_bundle_pack has created a zip file. The format of this file is internal to orderly (it will likely change and will at some point become resistant to tampering), but contains:

zip::zip_list(bundle$path)

##                                      filename compressed_size uncompressed_size
## 1                   20241112-024144-c52e793e/               0                 0
## 2              20241112-024144-c52e793e/meta/               0                 0
## 3    20241112-024144-c52e793e/meta/config.rds            1460              1455
## 4      20241112-024144-c52e793e/meta/info.rds            3414              3409
## 5  20241112-024144-c52e793e/meta/manifest.rds             285               280
## 6   20241112-024144-c52e793e/meta/session.rds           24762             24757
## 7              20241112-024144-c52e793e/pack/               0                 0
## 8  20241112-024144-c52e793e/pack/incoming.csv             542               888
## 9   20241112-024144-c52e793e/pack/orderly.yml             214               358
## 10     20241112-024144-c52e793e/pack/script.R             175               220
##              timestamp permissions    crc32 offset
## 1  2024-11-12 02:41:44         755 00000000      0
## 2  2024-11-12 02:41:44         755 00000000     55
## 3  2024-11-12 02:41:44         644 a5342844    115
## 4  2024-11-12 02:41:44         644 59a23885   1661
## 5  2024-11-12 02:41:44         644 072960fa   5159
## 6  2024-11-12 02:41:44         644 6d98961d   5532
## 7  2024-11-12 02:41:44         755 00000000  30381
## 8  2024-11-12 02:41:44         644 e3c70810  30441
## 9  2024-11-12 02:41:44         644 93fda3f3  31071
## 10 2024-11-12 02:41:44         644 58329b6b  31372

The subdirectory pack contains the report working directory, all code and dependencies, etc, while meta contains additional information required to run the report. In particular the incoming.csv file in the pack directory contains the dependency imported from other.

Then copy this zip file somewhere else to run it (details vary based on your system, and moving the file is not necessary to run it, though it will be the most likely situation).

Once the files have been moved we can run it with:

workdir <- tempfile()
res <- orderly::orderly_bundle_run(bundle$path, workdir)

## [ start      ]  2024-11-12 02:41:44.871885

## 
## > d <- read.csv("incoming.csv", stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
## 
## > png("graph.png")
## 
## > par(mar = c(15, 4, 0.5, 0.5))
## 
## > barplot(setNames(d$number, d$name), las = 2)

## 
## > dev.off()
## png 
##   2 
## 
## > info <- orderly::orderly_run_info()
## 
## > saveRDS(info, "info.rds")

## [ end        ]  2024-11-12 02:41:44.888103

## [ elapsed    ]  Ran report in 0.01621771 secs

## [ artefact   ]  graph.png: 67b3e662440b3978ee78b9d4cc159884
## [ ...        ]  info.rds: f22b1b91eecad4f709c1508a8e6d7ae0

With the workdir being a directory that you want the report to be run in. This can be the same as the path the incoming zip file is found, if you want, but this will make it harder to know what has been run already or not.

This creates another zip file, but this time contains the results of running the report.

The result can be imported into order by using orderly::orderly_bundle_import with the path to the zip file:

orderly::orderly_bundle_import(res$path, root = path)

## [ import     ]  use_dependency:20241112-024144-c52e793e

The copy of use_dependency is now in the archive and can be used like any other orderly report

orderly::orderly_list_archive(path)

##             name                       id
## 1          other 20241112-024144-5d6942b8
## 2 use_dependency 20241112-024144-c52e793e

orderly::orderly_graph("other", root = path)

## other [20241112-024144-5d6942b8]
## └──use_dependency [20241112-024144-c52e793e]

Limitations

• We do not yet verify that the incoming bundle comes from a trusted source, nor that the completed bundle was run on a trusted system, nor that the bundle pack was not modified en route. We will add a signing and verifying step in future that will address these issues.

• We do not support encryption of the bundle, but may do so in a future version.

• Secrets will be copied in clear text if included.

• We do not check that the package versions on the remote machine are suitable, though metadata is included to support this in future.

• We do not support reading from databases using the connection: field while the report is running (reading data before is fine). In future we may relax this so that the remote report interacts with the database. Practically this means that bundled reports cannot use the connection: field, and all data will be packaged into the bundle, and so may be large.

• As discussed above in the overview section, orderly does not deal with the movement of bundles between machines, nor queuing of these bundles.