opensafely-core / opensafely-core/stata-docker

Ensure Stata's default log output gets written to the container's stdout

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Dominant language
Stata
Stars
2
Forks
0
Avg merge
18h 29m
Merged PRs (30d)
1

Description

Currently we run Stata in batch mode (with the -b flag). This causes it to write it's output to a log file named <script-name>.log and means that Stata jobs have effectively zero useful information in the default logs.

We should make sure that these logs get written to stdout somehow (in a streaming fashion, not as a batch at the end, so we can see what long running jobs are up to).

It's possible that we don't actually need the -b flag but we'll have to experiment to see what the behaviour is.

Whatever happens we'll still need our wrapper script to parse the log output to try to guess whether the job has errored as Stata helpfully exits with status zero in all cases.

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First steps

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reproducing the current Stata batch-mode invocation and inspect the wrapper script that parses log output. Experiment with the -b flag and log handling to determine how output can stream to stdout while preserving error detection. Done means long-running job output is visible in container stdout and the wrapper still parses the log output.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
docker
Domain
devops, infrastructure
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
45/100

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