CLI tools are still missing

[brett-miller]

"Although Bistro has been in production at Facebook for over 3 years, the present public release is partial, including just the server components. The CLI tools and web UI will be shipping shortly."

It would be great to see these.

[ajtulloch]

The CLI has been ready for open sourcing for a few months - I'll ping @lesha. The Web UI is Phabricator-based IIRC, I'm not sure what @lesha's plan was there for how to distribute that.

[ajtulloch]

@snarkmaster on GitHub is @lesha at Facebook I guess :)

[snarkmaster]

@brett-miller -- thanks for the interest! The OSS releases have hit a lull due to some personal challenges I've had. However, I'm preparing a major update, which will include the CLI for sure. The Web UI uses the Phabricator PHP stack (is this familiar to you?), but it has drifted a bit from trunk, and it may now take some effort to get it to run on upstream. Can you share a bit about the application you had in mind?

[knx007]

Hi, any news on that topic ? thx

[snarkmaster]

@knx007, well, yes, and no. I haven't forgotten about it, no. I have made progress on this, yes. Why so slow? I've wanted to get some more features into the release, but in retrospect, it's a bad idea to block on features. I'll focus on the new release after I finish the feature I'm currently working on.

[knx007]

Thx :)

[neven7]

bistro can support docker？and Waiting for a new release. thanks

[snarkmaster]

@neven7 -- which one do you mean?

• Run within a Docker container? Sure.
• Start Docker containers -- yes, if your provide a script, which boots your container, and cleans it up upon receiving SIGTERM. If you want nicer support, it is possible to add that too. But Docker integration is not currently a first-class feature.

[JanMikes]

Hi, for last few days i am playing with Bistro and so far i like it! There were some struggles with building and using with docker, but im fine now :-).

I would love to share that i am as well interested in Bistro CLI.

Thank you for your work!

[snarkmaster]

@JanMikes, so the Bistro CLI has been abandoned internally for the past ~4 years -- neither used nor maintained. For this reason, I don't think it's good idea to shove it over the fence. As a concrete blocker, the CLI is in Python2, which is no longer supported. Another issue (IMO) is that the CLI relies on pandas, which is a heavy and slow dependency that most people would not benefit from. A third issue is that its handling of multi-shard jobs is poor, because it was quickly hacked together primarily for a single-shard-job setting.

If a customer with resources were willing to take on the maintenance of the CLI, I would be glad to help get this off the ground, either by consulting on a from-scratch project, or by sharing the existing code.

The good news is that the existing CLI is 1600 lines of code, so it's not hard to replace it with something modern that works.

Internally, people tend to interact with Bistro via the REST (for data / UI-type queries) or Thrift APIs (for command-and-control), or via the web UI.

[JanMikes]

Internally, people tend to interact with Bistro via the REST

Thank you, looks like this is the way to go a was anyways my favorite solution. I was just thinking about that calling curl from crontab seems to be way less elegant than using a cli, but both would do the job done anyways :-).