eLife Bot is a set of tools built on top of Amazon's Simple Work Flow (SWF) to manage publication workflow. The workflows, activities, and libraries change often to support eLife's evolving requirements.
When we publish an article within eLife we want a number of processes to happen. eLife Bot incorporates an event driven architecture from S3 bucket notifications when new files arrive. History is stored in an AWS Simple DataBase, as well as in S3 buckets. When a new or modified file is identified a workflow is trigged in SWF.
Digest zip files copied to the digest input bucket (a bucket with a name matching *-elife-bot-digests-input) will normally transmit the digest output to a third-party by email or to an API endpoint when a IngestDigest workflow is executed.
You can trigger a silent IngestDigest workflow, which still validates the input and replaces existing digest data in eLife buckets, but avoids sending a digest to the third-party, by altering the file name of the digest zip file.
To start a silent digest workflow, make sure the zip file name ends with -silent.zip (with case insensitive matching, so it can be -silent.zip or -SILENT.zip), and copy that file to the digest input bucket.
eLife bot is currently configured and deployed by eLife builder libraries.
We have added unit tests for the eLife bot activities using Python unittest library. Running on the command line: cd to elife-bot and execute: python -m pytest --junitxml=build/junit.xml tests/
In principle this system can be extended horizontally. Adding new workers and workflows should be easy.
To start a workflow execution manually, for the starter to import the modules it requires, add PYTHONPATH to the invocation. For example, from the elife-bot root directory:
PYTHONPATH=. python starter/starter_Ping.py -e dev
Issues and backlog items are stored in Github on the project issues page.
Major milestones that we would like to see are:
- setting up deployment
- making extending the workflow super easy
- adding a visual reporting strucutre
- adding a way to poll external endpoints for ALM data (potentially)
If you have a contribution you would like us to consider, please send a pull request.
This is part of the eLife suite of tools. You can find more resources at elifesciences.org.
eLife is an open access publisher in the life sciences. We are supported by The Wellcome Trust, The Howard Hughes Medical Institute and The Max Planck Society. We publish at elifescience.org.
Copyright 2016 eLife Sciences. Licensed under the MIT license.