Custom workflows

Note

We’re constantly adding examples to this page, so please check back soon for more. Or, if you have a request or a workflow you’d like to share, please either open an issue or suggest an edit to this page by clicking the GitHub link at the top.

Default figure generation

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By default, the workflow defined in the Snakefile looks like this:

# User config
configfile: "showyourwork.yml"


# Import the showyourwork module
module showyourwork:
    snakefile:
        "showyourwork/workflow/Snakefile"
    config:
        config


# Use all default rules
use rule * from showyourwork

The default behavior in this workflow is to infer figure dependencies based on the figure labels in the tex file. The following block in ms.tex

\begin{figure}
    \begin{centering}
        \includegraphics{figures/mandelbrot.pdf}
        \caption{The Mandelbrot set.}
        % This label tells showyourwork that the script `figures/mandelbrot.py'
        % generates the PDF file included above
        \label{fig:mandelbrot}
    \end{centering}
\end{figure}

tells showyourwork to execute a script called mandelbrot.py in the src/figures directory to generated figures/mandelbrot.pdf. To change, supplement, or override this behavior, read on!

Multi-panel figures

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It is possible to include multiple figures within a figure environment, provided they are all generated by the same script:

\begin{figure}[ht!]
    \begin{centering}
        \includegraphics[width=0.4\linewidth]{figures/koch1.pdf}
        \includegraphics[width=0.4\linewidth]{figures/koch2.pdf}
        \caption{
            Two Koch snowflakes.
        }
        % This label tells showyourwork that the script `figures/koch.py'
        % generates the two PDF files included above
        \label{fig:koch}
    \end{centering}
\end{figure}

If you would like to include figures generated from different scripts in the same figure environment, you’ll have to provide a custom rule (see below).

One script, multiple figures

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Conversely, we can also have different figure environments, all of which include figure files generated from the same script. If you follow the usual convention, this would result in duplicated labels, since these figure environments would share the same label (determined only by the name of the script that generated them). To get around this, showyourwork supports adding tags to the end of figure labels to make them unique.

\begin{figure}[ht!]
    \begin{centering}
        \includegraphics[width=0.4\linewidth]{figures/mandelbrot.pdf}
        \caption{
            This figure was generated by the script \texttt{mandelbrot.py}
            and is labeled \texttt{fig:mandelbrot:original}.
        }
        \label{fig:mandelbrot:original}
    \end{centering}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[ht!]
    \begin{centering}
        \includegraphics[width=0.4\linewidth]{figures/mandelbrot_red.pdf}
        \caption{
            This figure was generated by the script \texttt{mandelbrot.py}
            and is labeled \texttt{fig:mandelbrot:red}.
        }
        \label{fig:mandelbrot:red}
    \end{centering}
\end{figure}

In the example above, the script mandelbrot.py generates two PDFs, which are displayed in separate figure environments. We label them fig:mandelbrot:original and fig:mandelbrot:red to make them unique; showyourwork ignores everything after the second colon, and understands that both figure environments correspond to the same figure script (mandelbrot.py).

Static figures

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It is also possible to commit the figure PDF/PNG/SVG/etc directly and tell showyourwork not to try to produce it programmatically. Simply place the figure in the src/static directory:

\begin{figure}[ht!]
    \begin{centering}
        \includegraphics[width=0.4\linewidth]{static/broccoli.pdf}
        \caption{
            A photo of some broccoli.
        }
        % The fact that the figure is in the static directory tells
        % showyourwork not to look for a script that generates this figure
        \label{fig:broccoli}
    \end{centering}
\end{figure}

Script dependencies

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Sometimes we would like to tell showyourwork about script dependencies, such as when our figure script imports something from a locally-hosted script or package. We can do this in the same way as above by specifying a dependency in the configuration file showyourwork.yml:

# Tell showyourwork that `src/figures/my_figure.py`
# depends on `src/figures/utils/helper_script.py`
figure_dependencies:
    my_figure.py:
        - utils/helper_script.py

Dataset dependencies

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If you have a dataset hosted on Zenodo, showyourwork can automatically download it for you and link to it in the corresponding figure caption in the article PDF. All you have to do is specify the name of the dataset and its Zenodo record ID in the config file showyourwork.yml:

# Tell showyourwork that `src/figures/fibonacci.py`
# requires the file `src/figures/fibonacci.dat` to run
figure_dependencies:
    fibonacci.py:
        - fibonacci.dat

# Tell showyourwork where to find ``src/figures/fibonacci.dat``
zenodo:
    - fibonacci.dat:
        download:
            id: 5187276

The YAML snippet above tells showyourwork that the script src/figures/fibonacci.py requires the dataset src/figures/fibonacci.dat in order to run (note that under the figure_dependencies key, all paths are relative to the src/figures directory.) It also tells showyourwork that this dataset can be downloaded from Zenodo, and that it has the record ID 5187276. Specifically, that means the file lives at the URL https://zenodo.org/record/5187276 and can be downloaded by running

curl https://zenodo.org/record/5187276/files/fibonacci.dat

Note that if this dataset is a tarball, you’ll have to untar it within fibonacci.py, or specify a custom rule in the Snakefile (see below).

Alternatively, you can manually specify how to download a dataset dependency. This is useful if, e.g., it’s hosted somewhere other than Zenodo, or if you need to do some post-processing (like unzipping) before running your figure script. To do that, simply don’t provide a download instruction in the showyourwork.yml file:

figure_dependencies:
    fibonacci.py:
        - fibonacci.dat

and instead create a custom rule in the Snakefile:

# Custom rule to download a dataset
rule fibonacci:
    output:
        "src/figures/fibonacci.dat"
    shell:
        "curl https://zenodo.org/record/5187276/files/fibonacci.dat --output {output[0]}"

Note that in the Snakefile, all paths are relative to the top level of your repo. Also note that this approach will not automatically add a dataset link to your figure caption.

Simulation dependencies

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Quite often you may have a figure that is very computationally expensive to run. An example is a posterior distribution plot for an MCMC run, or a plot of an expensive fluid dynamical simulation. If the runtime is more than a few tens of minutes (on a single machine), you probably don’t want to run it on GitHub Actions, even if you rely on showyourwork caching. One way around this is to run the simulation, upload the results to Zenodo (via the workflow discussed above), and treat that as a static “dataset” on which your figure depends. The downside, however, is that your workflow is no longer fully reproducible, since it depends on the result of a black-box simulation.

To address this, showyourwork supports dynamic rules that can alternate between running the simulation and uploading to Zenodo (when running on a local machine), and downloading the simulation from Zenodo (when running on GitHub Actions). This can be achieved by specifying additional instructions in the showyourwork.yml file:

figure_dependencies:
    my_figure.py:
        - simulation.dat

zenodo:
    - simulation.dat:
        generate:
            shell: python run_simulation.py
            dependencies:
                - run_simulation.py
            sandbox: false
            token_name: ZENODO_TOKEN
            title: Simulation results
            description: >-
                This is the result of a very expensive simulation.
                Here is some text describing the simulation in detail,
                how it was generated, and how to use the dataset.
            creators:
                - Luger, Rodrigo

There’s a lot going on in this example, so let’s break it down piece by piece. First, we’re telling showyourwork that the figure script src/figures/my_figure.py requires the result of some expensive simulation, stored in the data file src/figures/simulation.dat. Then, under zenodo:, instead of specifying the download: id: of the dataset, we instead explicitly tell showyourwork how to generate it with the generate key. Specifically, we provide a shell command to run the simulation and produce the output (recalling that all paths are relative to the src/figures directory, which is also the CWD for the shell command). We also tell showyourwork about any dependencies of the simulation. These, as before, are files that, when modified, will trigger a re-run of the simulation (but only if running locally). In this case, changes to the script src/figures/run_simulation.py will result in a re-run of the simulation the next time I execute the workflow locally.

The next several instructions tell showyourwork how to upload the results of the simulation to Zenodo. The title, description, and creators keys should be self-explanatory: they will show up in the metadata section of the Zenodo deposit. The sandbox key is a boolean flag telling showyourwork whether to use the Zenodo Sandbox service (the default is False); this is useful for testing and debugging, and should be disabled once you release your code/paper.

Finally, since showyourwork will upload the results of the simulation to Zenodo, it needs your credentials to access the API. So, in order for this all to work, you need to do three things:

  1. If you haven’t done this already, create a Zenodo account and generate a personal access token. Make sure to give it at least deposit:actions and deposit:write scopes, and store it somewhere safe.

  2. To give showyourwork access to Zenodo from your local machine, assign your token to an environment variable called ZENODO_TOKEN. I export mine from within my .zshrc or .bashrc config file so that it’s always available in all terminals.

  3. To give showyourwork access to Zenodo from GitHub Actions, create a repository secret in your GitHub repository called ZENODO_TOKEN and set its value equal to your Zenodo token.

Warning

Never include your personal access tokens in any files committed to GitHub!

Now you should be all set. Make sure to run your expensive simulation locally before pushing your changes to GitHub – otherwise GitHub Actions won’t find the file on Zenodo, and the build will fail.

If all goes well, you should see an icon pop up next to the corresponding figure caption with a link to the record on Zenodo for your simulation results.

Custom figure scripts

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showyourwork allows you to specify custom scripts for figures. This is useful when showyourwork can’t automatically determine the figure script, such as when a figure is included outside of a figure environment. The easiest way is to subclass the figure rule defined in the showyourwork module:

# Subclass the `figure` rule to specify that the figure
# `src/figures/custom_figure.pdf` is generated from the script
# `src/figures/custom_script.py`
use rule figure from showyourwork as custom_figure with:
    input:
        "src/figures/custom_script.py",
        "environment.yml"
    output:
        "src/figures/custom_figure.pdf"

Alternatively, you may override the internal figure rule completely:

rule custom_figure:
    input:
        "src/figures/custom_script.py",
        "environment.yml",
    output:
        "src/figures/custom_figure.pdf"
    conda:
        "environment.yml"
    shell:
        "cd src/figures && python custom_script.py"

This can be used to execute arbitrary commands for generating figures, such as producing a figure via a language other than Python, or producing a figure from a Jupyter notebook. Note that in both cases, showyourwork expects that the first file listed under input is the main script associated with the figure, and this is what the link in the figure caption will point to on GitHub.