gravity 0.9.0

Command-line utilities to assist in managing Galaxy servers

gravity - Galaxy Server Administration

A process manager (supervisor) and management tools for Galaxy servers.

Installing this will give you two executables, galaxyctl which is used to manage the starting, stopping, and logging of Galaxy’s various processes, and galaxy, which can be used to run a Galaxy server in the foreground.

Installation

Python 3.6 or later is required. Gravity can be installed independently of Galaxy, but please read the section on Galaxy Integration below.

To install:

$ pip install gravity

To make your life easier, you are encourged to install into a virtualenv. The easiest way to do this is with Python’s built-in venv module:

$ python3 -m venv ~/gravity
$ . ~/gravity/bin/activate

By default, Gravity will store its state, configuration, and log files in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/galaxy-gravity, where $XDG_CONFIG_HOME typically defaults to ~/.config. You can change this with the --state-dir option to the Gravity commands, or by setting $GRAVITY_STATE_DIR in your environment.

Galaxy 22.01 Integration

Gravity was originally designed to support managing multiple Galaxy (as well as Galaxy Reports and Tool Shed) servers on a single host, but hides some of this complexity from you if you are working with a single Galaxy server. Additionally, Galaxy 22.01 has added Gravity as a dependency, and changes have been made to Gravity to support this mode of operation.

• Gravity 0.9.0 has dropped support for running Galaxy with uWSGI in favor of gunicorn and FastAPI.

• Gravity 0.9.0 cannot be used with Galaxy versions older than 22.01.

• As of Galaxy 22.01, Gravity is automatically installed into Galaxy’s virtualenv by Galaxy’s setup scripts (as called by run.sh)

• Galaxy’s setup scripts as of 22.01 also set $GRAVITY_STATE_DIR to <galaxy_root>/database/gravity when running Galaxy from the source directory. This keeps each Galaxy instance’s Gravity configuration separate.

Usage

If running from the root of a Galaxy source tree, you can start and run Galaxy in the foreground with:

$ galaxy
Registered galaxy config: /home/nate/work/galaxy/config/galaxy.yml
Creating or updating service gunicorn
Creating or updating service celery
Creating or updating service celery-beat
celery: added process group
2022-01-20 14:44:24,619 INFO spawned: 'celery' with pid 291651
celery-beat: added process group
2022-01-20 14:44:24,620 INFO spawned: 'celery-beat' with pid 291652
gunicorn: added process group
2022-01-20 14:44:24,622 INFO spawned: 'gunicorn' with pid 291653
celery                           STARTING
celery-beat                      STARTING
gunicorn                         STARTING
==> /home/nate/work/galaxy/database/gravity/log/gunicorn.log <==
...log output follows...

Galaxy will continue to run and output logs to stdout until terminate it with CTRL+C.

The galaxy command is actually a shortcut for three separate steps: 1. Register your Galaxy configuration file (galaxy.yml) with Gravity, 2. write out the process manager configurations, and 3. start and run Galaxy in the foreground using the process manager (supervisor). You can perform these steps separately (and in this example, start Galaxy as a backgrounded daemon instead of in the foreground):

$ galaxyctl register config/galaxy.yml
Registered galaxy config: /home/nate/work/galaxy/config/galaxy.yml
$ galaxyctl update
Creating or updating service gunicorn
Creating or updating service celery
Creating or updating service celery-beat
$ galaxyctl start
celery                           STARTING
celery-beat                      STARTING
gunicorn                         STARTING
Log files are in /home/nate/work/galaxy/database/gravity/log

When running as a daemon, the stop subcommand stops your Galaxy server:

$ galaxyctl stop
celery-beat: stopped
gunicorn: stopped
celery: stopped
All processes stopped, supervisord will exit
Shut down

Once a Galaxy configuration file has been registered with Gravity, it doesn’t matter where you call galaxy or galaxyctl from.

Configuration

The following options in the galaxy section of galaxy.yml can be used to control Gravity:: unset are shown):

# Override the default instance name, this is mostly hidden from you when running a single instance # of Galaxy
instance_name: _default_

# Application server, either gunicorn (default) or unicornherder
app_server: gunicorn

# Application/web server bind address (default: localhost), use 0.0.0.0 for all interfaces on host
bind_address: localhost

# Application/web server bind port (default: 8080)
bind_port: 8080

# Path to Galaxy source if not running from the source directory
galaxy_root:

# Path to directory where log files will be written (default: $GRAVITY_STATE_DIR/log)
log_dir:

# Number of dynamic job handler processes to start (default: web server handles jobs)
job_handler_count:

# Template for dynamic job handler server naming (default: job-handler-{instance_number})
job_handler_name_template:

Regarding choices for the app_server option:

• gunicorn (default): The Gunicorn Python WSGI server

• unicornherder: Production-oriented manager for (G)unicorn servers that allows for zero-downtime Galaxy server restarts, similar to uWSGI Zerg Mode used in the past.

Galaxy Job Handlers

Gravity has limited support for reading Galaxy’s job configuration: it can read statically configured job handlers in the job_conf.xml file, but cannot read the newer YAML-format job configuration, or the job configuration inline from galaxy.yml. Improved support for reading Galaxy’s job configuration is planned, but for the time being, Gravity will run standalone Galaxy job handler processes if you:

1. Set job_handler_count to a number greater than 0. NOTE: You must also explicitly set the job handler assignment method to db-skip-locked or db-transaction-isolation to prevent the web process from also handling jobs. This is the preferred method for specifying job handlers.

2. Define static <handler id="..."/> handlers in the XML-format job configuration file.

Configuration Precendence

Gravity’s configuration is defined in Galaxy’s configuration file to be easy and familiar for Galaxy administrators, but Gravity maintains its own state in $GRAVITY_STATE_DIR/configstate.yaml. If set, the options in galaxy.yml will override Gravity’s saved state whenever galaxyctl update is run, but if later unset, then the persisted values in Gravity’s saved state are used.

The exception is the values of app_server and job_handler_*, which will revert to default values if unset in galaxy.yml, because Gravity dynamically adds and removes services based on the Galaxy configuration by design.

Subcommands

Use galaxyctl --help for help. Subcommands also support --help, e.g. galaxy register --help

register

Register a Galaxy server config (galaxy.yml) with Gravity. Does not update or start. Run galaxyctl update after registering to apply changes.

list

List config files registered with the process manager.

deregister

Deregister a Galaxy server config, Gravity will no longer manage this Galaxy instance. Run galaxyctl update after deregistering to apply changes.

start

Start and run Galaxy and associated processes in daemonized (background) mode, or -f to run in the foreground and follow log files. The galaxy command is a shortcut for galaxyctl start -f.

If no config files are registered and you run galaxyctl start from the root of a Galaxy source tree, it automatically runs the equivalent of:

$ galaxyctl register config/galaxy.yml  # or galaxy.yml.sample if galaxy.yml does not exist
$ galaxyctl update
$ galaxyctl start

stop

Stop daemonized Galaxy server processes. If no processes remain running after this step (which should be the case when working with a single Galaxy instance), supervisord will terminate.

restart

Restart Galaxy server processes. This is done in a relatively “brutal” fashion: processes are signaled (by supervisor) to exit, and then are restarted. See the graceful subcommand to restart gracefully.

graceful

Restart Galaxy with minimal interruption. If running with gunicorn this means holding the web socket open while restarting (connections to Galaxy will block). If running with unicornherder, a new Galaxy application will be started and the old one shut down only once the new one is accepting connections. A graceful restart with unicornherder should be transparent to clients.

update

Figure out what has changed in configs, which could be:

• changes to the Gravity configuration options in galaxy.yml

• adding or removing handlers in job_conf.xml

This may cause service restarts if there are any changes.

Any needed changes to supervisor configs will be performed and then supervisorctl update will be called.

update is called automatically for the start, stop, restart, and graceful subcommands.

shutdown

Stop all processes and cause supervisord to terminate. Similar to stop but there is no ambiguity as to whether supervisord remains running.

supervisorctl

Pass through directly to supervisor. Run galaxyctl supervisorctl to invoke the supervisorctl shell, or galaxyctl supervisorctl [command] to call a supervisorctl command directly. See the supervisor documentation or galaxyctl supervisorctl help for help.

instances

List known (configured) Galaxy instances and services.

show

Show stored configuration details for the named config file.

rename

If your galaxy.yml has moved, you can update its path in Gravity’s saved state with this command.

configstate.yaml

As discussed in the Configuration section, Gravity maintains a state file that also acts as a configuration of sorts. Administrators deploying Galaxy with a deployment tool (e.g. Ansible) can take advantage of this to deploy a Gravity state file as part of their Galaxy deployment. See the $GRAVITY_STATE_DIR/configstate.yaml file after performing a register and update command to see what this file looks like, or below for an example. Keep in mind that running galaxyctl commands after changing the Galaxy configuration can cause changes to the state file because it was not originally intended to be user-maintainable. See Issue #6 for discussion and development related to this, as we seek to provide a more consistent experience in working with Gravity’s configuration.

Example

A configstate.yaml file for a Galaxy service might look like:

config_files:
  /home/nate/work/galaxy/config/galaxy.yml:
    config_type: galaxy
    instance_name: _default_
    attribs:
      app_server: gunicorn
      log_dir: /home/nate/work/galaxy/database/gravity/log
      bind_address: localhost
      bind_port: 8080
      galaxy_root: /home/nate/work/galaxy
    services:
    - config_type: galaxy
      service_type: gunicorn
      service_name: gunicorn
    - config_type: galaxy
      service_type: celery
      service_name: celery
    - config_type: galaxy
      service_type: celery-beat
      service_name: celery-beat

History

0.9

• Converted CLI from argparse to click.

• Stole ideas and code from planemo in general.

• Improve the AttributeDict so that it can have “hidden” items (anything that starts with a _) that won’t be serialized. Also, it serializes itself and can be created via deserialization from a classmethod. This simplifies using it to persist state data in the new GravityState subclass.

0.8.3

• Merge galaxycfg and galaxyadm commands to galaxy.

0.8.2

• Allow for passing names of individual services directly to supervisorctl via the start, stop, and restart methods.

• Fix a bug where uWSGI would not start when using the automatic virtualenv install method.

0.8.1

• Version bump because I deleted the 0.8 files from PyPI, and despite the fact that it lets you delete them, it doesn’t let you upload once they have been uploaded once…

0.8

• Add auto-register to galaxy start if it’s called from the root (or subdirectory) of a Galaxy root directory.

• Make galaxycfg remove accept instance names as params in addition to config file paths.

• Use the same hash generated for an instance name as the hash for a generated virtualenv name, so virtualenvs are more easily identified as belonging to a config.

• Renamed from galaxyadmin to gravity (thanks John Chilton).

0.7

• Added the galaxyadm subcommand graceful on a suggestion from Nicola Soranzo.

• Install uWSGI into the config’s virtualenv if requested.

• Removed any dependence on Galaxy and eggs.

• Moved project to its own repository from the Galaxy clone I’d been working from.

Older

• Works in progress as part of the Galaxy code.