tinylogdir

A lightweight library for creating output directories of python scripts.

Why not just os.makedirs?

1. tinylogdir handles existing directories gracefully by prompting the user to append a timestamp or counter to the directory name, or by deleting the existing directory.
   1. Use case: Calling a script with the same output path multiple times, and creating multiple timestamped directories.
2. tinylogdir stores information about the calling environment in tinylogdir.yaml.
   1. Use case: Identifying the process, user and hostname for the script of a given logging directory.
   2. Use case: Reproducing the context in which the script was called, e.g. the exact command, environment variables, git commit and diff (if script is part of a git repository).

Installation

pip install tinylogdir

Usage

import argparse, tinylogdir

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("--output", type=str, required=True)
args = parser.parse_args()

log = tinylogdir.LogDir(args.output)

This creates the given logging directory and a file tinylogdir.yaml that looks like:

cmd: /home/foo/myrepository/myscript.py --output /home/foo/mylogdir
cwd: /home/foo/myrepository
environ:
  CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES: '0'
  STY: 4144356.pts-3.pc123-serverroom
git:
  commit: f0efbbada057bf68f8cc7a8e2aa315e65ce93f910
  path: /home/foo/myrepository
hostname: pc123-serverroom
pid: 414276
time: '2021-04-20T12:31:17'
user: myusername

If the calling script is part of a git repository, this also creates the file gitdiff.patch with the results of a call to git diff that allows reproducing the state of the repository (tracked files) at the time the script was called.

Notes

• A default mode for handling existing directories can be passed to the constructor as tinylogdir.LogDir(args.output, mode="t") with values in ["d", "delete", "t", "timestamp", "c", "counter"].
• The function log.dir("results-123/test") can be used to create subdirectories and return the absolute path as string.