Shed Operations on Github URLs

[jmchilton]

Update shed realization process to take in git URLs in addiiton to file paths. This will allow each of shed_create, shed_upload, shed_diff, shed_download, and shed_lint to work on repositories sitting in Github.

[peterjc]

Would this mean you can just download & install planemo, and then pull a tool directly from GitHub to the Tool Shed (without first cloning the tool from GitHub to the local disk)?

[jmchilton]

Yes... I mean planemo would clone the repo into /tmp presumably - but the "user" wouldn't really be exposed to that directly.

I am not sure there is a super-compelling use case on its own - but after that functionality was added the next step would be creating a well tested "model" persisting links .shed.yml URLs (presumably mostly on github), and then building a REST-y web interface on top of that "model" and the existing shed_ commands - perhaps optionally tapping into the shed database directly for auth and user management, and then ultimately an actual web app for managing shed repositories.

This would implement a vision for replacing the tool developer-facing portions of the tool shed web interface with a simpler interface centered on sync-ing repositories with Github. The team had discussed this interface with the scientific advisory board long before planemo had these shed_* operations - so I am not sure the web interface vision is as important now that planemo and @erasche's Jenkins work make publishing... easy enough? - but I do think if this is implemented it will be powered by planemo's interface to the tool shed.

[hexylena]

When I saw this, the super-compelling use case that came to mind was a queued task on a TS server, meaning @martenson would have the TS-GitHub integration done for him, he just has to queue a task on receipt of a github hook.

[peterjc]

@jmchilton's description of a Tool shed web interface for Tool authors to pull/sync their repositories updates from Github is interesting - but is still a manual process.

Meanwhile, I'm starting to use planemo for automating pushing my tools to the Tool Shed from the command line, a bit step forward in reproducibility/automation 👍

[martenson]

@peterjc not necesarilly a manual process - I am thinking more of a cron-like job with option to manually instant run

Also: thanks @jmchilton