BotBot

A manager for lab computational resources.

Functionality

• Ensures all files in a shared folder are group readable.
• Encourages users to use symbolic links instead of copying large files.
• Suggests file compression when appropriate to save space.
• Modular design allowing for easy extension.

Installation

Manual

If you want the latest and greatest development code, go ahead and clone this repo:

git clone https://github.com/jackstanek/BotBot.git
cd BotBot

then run

./install.sh

If you want to run the test suite as well, you'll need to run

./install.sh -t

instead.

To run the test suite just run py.test in the project directory.

Usage

If you want to use BotBot to check files and directories on demand, use the command:

botbot file [options] PATH

There a handful of options you can use:

• -c, --cached: generate a report based on the results of the most recent check.
• -k, --force-recheck: clears the cached version of the last check and rechecks the file or directory.
• -s, --shared: use a set of checks intended for files and directories in the shared folder.
• -l, --follow-symlinks: force BotBot to follow symbolic links.
• -m, --me: only check files that belong to you.

You can also use BotBot to check if your environment variables are set up correctly. However, this feature needs a little configuration to work properly. You must first configure the [important] section in botbot.conf.

After that, you can use the command:

botbot env

to check that the environment variables are properly configured.

Configuration

BotBot uses 2 primary configuration files: ~/.botbotignore and ~/.botbot/botbot.conf.

.botbotignore

This is a list of files that BotBot won't check. It is similar in structure to a .gitignore file, but it's a bit simpler. Instead of git's structure, each line is a string which can be handled by the Python built-in glob module. Anything after a # character will be ignored, so these can be used to add comments.

.botbot/botbot.conf

Configuration variables are stored here. The file is an .ini-style configuration formatted file. The variables are stored in sections as follows:

• [checks]

  • oldage: defines how many days old a file must be to be considered "old".

  • largesize: defines how many bytes large a file must be to be considered "large".

• [email] (REQUIRED for email mode)

  • domain: the domain that the users' email accounts are on
  • email: your email address (which emails are sent from)
  • password: your email password
  • smtp_server: the SMTP server you will send from
  • smtp_port: the port the SMTP server uses (probably 587, check with your server administrator or documentation)
  • grace_period: amount of time, in minutes, after changing a file that a user can fix potential issues before receiving an email about said changes

• [important]

  • ext: defines which file extensions are considered "important." By default, *.sam and *.bam files are denoted as important.
  • pathitems: defines which paths (separated by colons) should be present in the PATH environment variable.
  • ldlibpath: defines which paths (separated by colons) should be present in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable.

Testing

BotBot uses pytest as its test suite. To run the tests, run py.test in the project root directory.