Running chef scripts¶

The base class SushiChef provides a lot of command line arguments that control the chef script’s operation. It is expected that every chef script will come with a README that explains the desired command line arguments for the chef script.

Executable scripts¶

On UNIX systems, you can make your sushi chef script (e.g. chef.py) run as a standalone command line application. To make a script program, you need to do three things:

- Add the line `#!/usr/bin/env python` as the first line of `chef.py`
- Add this code block at the bottom of `chef.py` if it is not already there:

      if __name__ == '__main__':
          chef = MySushiChef()  # replace with you chef class name
          chef.main()

- Make the file `chef.py` executable by running `chmod +x chef.py` on the
  command line.

You can now call your sushi chef script using ./chef.py ... instead of the longer python chef.py ....

Ricecooker CLI¶

You can run ./chef.py -h to see an always-up-to-date info about the ricecooker CLI interface:

usage: tutorial_chef.py [-h] [--token TOKEN] [-u] [-v] [--quiet] [--warn]
                        [--debug] [--compress] [--thumbnails]
                        [--download-attempts DOWNLOAD_ATTEMPTS]
                        [--reset | --resume]
                        [--step {INIT, CONSTRUCT_CHANNEL, CREATE_TREE, DOWNLOAD_FILES, GET_FILE_DIFF,
                           START_UPLOAD, UPLOADING_FILES, UPLOAD_CHANNEL, PUBLISH_CHANNEL,DONE, LAST}]
                        [--prompt] [--stage] [--publish] [--daemon]
                        [--nomonitor] [--cmdsock CMDSOCK]
                    
required arguments:
  --token TOKEN         Authorization token (can be token or path to file with token)

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -u, --update          Force re-download of files (skip .ricecookerfilecache/ check)
  -v, --verbose         Verbose mode
  --quiet               Print only errors to stderr
  --warn                Print warnings to stderr
  --debug               Print debugging log info to stderr
  --compress            Compress high resolution videos to low resolution
                        videos
  --thumbnails          Automatically generate thumbnails for topics
  --download-attempts DOWNLOAD_ATTEMPTS
                        Maximum number of times to retry downloading files
  --reset               Restart session, overwriting previous session (cannot
                        be used with --resume flag)
  --resume              Resume from ricecooker step (cannot be used with
                        --reset flag)
  --step  {INIT, ...    Step to resume progress from (must be used with --resume flag)
  --prompt              Prompt user to open the channel after creating it
  --stage               Upload to staging tree to allow for manual
                        verification before replacing main tree
  --publish             Publish newly uploaded version of the channel
  --daemon              Run chef in daemon mode
  --nomonitor           Disable SushiBar progress monitoring
  --cmdsock CMDSOCK     Local command socket (for cronjobs)

extra options:
  You can pass arbitrary key=value options on the command line

Extra options¶

In addition to the command line arguments described above, the ricecooker CLI supports passing additional keyword options using the format key=value key2=value2.

It is common for a chef script to accept a “language option” like lang=fr which runs the French version of the chef script. This way a single chef codebase can create multiple Kolibri Studio channels, one for each language.

These extra options will be parsed along with the riceooker arguments and passed as along to all the chef’s methods: pre_run, run, get_channel, construct_channel, etc.

For example, a script started using ./chef.py ... lang=fr could:

Subclass the method get_channel to set the channel name to "Channel Name ({})".format(getlang('fr').native_name)
Use the language code fr in pre_run, run, and construct_channel to crawl and scrape the French version of the source website

Resuming interrupted chef runs¶

If your ricecooker session gets interrupted, you can resume from any step that has already completed using --resume --step=<step> option. If step is not specified, ricecooker will resume from the last step you ran. The “state” necessary to support these checkpoints is stored in the directory restore in the folder where the chef runs.

Use the --reset flag to skip the auto-resume prompt.

Caching¶

Use --update argument to skip checks for the .ricecookerfilecache directory. This is required if you suspect the files on the source website have been updated.

Note that some chef scripts implement their own caching mechanism, so you need to disable those caches as well if you want to make sure you’re getting new content.

Run scripts¶

For complicated chef scripts that run in multiple languages or with multiple options, the chef author can implement a “run script” that can be run as:

./run.sh

The script should contain the appropriate command args and options (basically the same thing as the instructions in the chef’s README but runnable).

Daemon mode¶

Starting a chef script with the --daemon argument makes it listen for remote control commands from the sushibar host. For more information, see Daemonization.