Add util methods to get system / environment info

[angela97lin]

Implements evalml.show_info() from featuretool's implementation

[codecov]

Codecov Report

Merging #300 into master will not change coverage.
The diff coverage is n/a.

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  Files         136      136           
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  Misses         48       48           

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[dsherry]

@angela97lin said: this is good to go, maybe missing tests. Next step: I'll review

[dsherry]

What's this file for?

[angela97lin]

Allows for command line commands! Try using evalml info

[dsherry]

Oh, got it. That's cool!

Is there a reason we should support a cmdline interface like this instead of defining evalml.info()? What does featuretools do? What does pandas do?

[angela97lin]

In this case, we're supporting both cmdline and evalml.print_info(); not sure if pandas has something similar but this is what featuretools does!

[dsherry]

@angela97lin that's pretty neat!

In that case, if we're going to keep the cmdline option, we need unit test coverage for it. My suggestion: use subprocess to run the cmd. Here's an example of how to do that using the shell script command ls -l as an example:

In [12]: result = subprocess.Popen(['ls', '-l'], cwd='/Users/dylan.sherry/development/evalml/',
stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)

In [13]: stdout_lines = result.stdout.readlines()

In [14]: stderr_lines = result.stderr.readlines()

In [15]: len(stderr_lines)
Out[15]: 0

In [16]: len(stdout_lines)
Out[16]: 21

Then you'll need to verify that the output contains what you expect. My advice would be to just do assert output == print_info(), because we should have separate unit test coverage to ensure the output of print_info is correct.

Also, I think you need to mirror featuretools and do this at the end of the file:

if __name__ == '__main__':
    cli()

Here's a long explanation of why.

And if this feels like too much, an alternative is to not expose a cmdline interface and just support import evalml; evalml.print_info(). Your call :)

[dsherry]

Oh lol! I just scrolled down to the test and I see you're already doing this with click. Very cool, will read that 😂

[angela97lin]

I'm testing via test_print_cli_cmd, which the Click documentation suggests, but lmk if you think that's not enough :)

[dsherry]

Yeah, looks good!

I think we should still add the name == main thing.

[dsherry]

Nice. Wonder what else can come back from this. I'm guessing it varies by platform?

[dsherry]

Can we have this get loaded from core-requirements.txt? It would be great to have this also check requirements.txt, and to not have to keep this list updated. Ok to file that as an separate issue.

[angela97lin]

Updated to parse from core-requirements.txt. Did you mean you want me to parse from requirements.txt too?

[dsherry]

@angela97lin this is awesome!! This is a great investment in our future debugging capabilities. Thanks for reviving it.

I'm having trouble getting the cmdline stuff to run locally. Can you help me debug that? Here's what I get:

(evalml) ➜  evalml git:(show_info) ✗ pwd
/Users/dylan.sherry/development/evalml
(evalml) ➜  evalml git:(show_info) ✗ evalml info
zsh: command not found: evalml

I tried it in bash too, not sure what's up. Any idea? I did add the if __name__ == '__main__': cli() to evalml/__main__.py but otherwise I was using your branch.

Also, can we update the prints to use the logger? It'll do the same thing for now, but it'll help when we get to some of the stuff from #460, because part of the acceptance criterion for that should be that we have zero print statements in our code! I mentioned this PR on #460

Once we get through that, I'll approve this :)

[angela97lin]

@dsherry Thanks for the helpful comments! I'll go back and update accordingly :)

RE running the command line interface: Huh, interesting. I created a new virtual env and it still worked fine for me 🤔Not sure if this would help at all but can you try making sure you've installed click (rerun the requirements file) and doing a fresh pip install -e . while in the evalml repo? If that still doesn't work, maybe we should set up some time to call and debug what's up :)

[dsherry]

@angela97lin ah, yeah, doing a fresh pip install -e . fixed it! I think that's because you had to add the entry_points config to setup.py. Cool. The output looks good!

[dsherry]

LGTM! 🚢