Recipe engine implementation details

This doc covers implementation details of the recipe engine and its processes. Read this if you want to understand/modify how the recipes as a system work. For general recipe development, please see user_guide.md.

[TOC]

Recipe engine subcommands

All recipe engine subcommands live in the commands folder. The __init__.py file here contains the entry point for all subcommand parsing parse_and_run which is invoked from main.py.

The commands module contains (as submodules) all of the subcommands that the recipe engine supports. The protocol is pretty simple:

The subcommand lives in a submodule (either directory or .py file).
Each submodule has a add_arguments(parser) function (for directories, this is expected to be in the __init__.py file).
Each submodule may also define an optional __cmd_priority__ field. This should be an integer which will be used to rank commands (e.g. so that 'run' and 'test' can precede all other subcommands). Commands will be ordered first by cmd_priority (lower values sort earlier) and then alphabetically. This is currently used to put run and test as the topmost arguments in the recipes.py help output.
The add_arguments function takes an argparse parser, and adds flags to it. The parser will be created:
- using the module's name as the command name
- using the module's __doc__ to generate both the description and 'help' for the parser (help will be the first paragraph of __doc__).

In addition to adding flags, the function must also call:

parser.set_defaults(
    postprocess_func=function(error, args), # optional
    func=function(args))                    # required

Where the 'args' parameter is the parsed CLI arguments and 'error' is the function to call if the preconditions for the subcommand aren't met.
postprocess_func should do any post-CLI checks and call error(msg) if the checks don't pass. Most subcommands don't need this, but it's a nice way to verify preconditions for the command.
func executes the actual subcommand.

The reason for this structure is so that the actual func can do lazy importing; this is necessary if the subcommand requires protobufs to operate correctly (which are only available after the CLI has successfully parsed).

All commands have args.recipe_deps, which is the resolved RecipeDeps instance to use.

Loading

This section talks about how the recipe engine gets from the recipes.py command invocation to the point where it begins executing the recipe.

Repo configuration

Recipes have a bit of an interesting multi-step loading process, though it has gotten simpler over the years.

Every recipe repo has at least two things:

A recipes.py script (which is a literal copy of recipes.py).
A recipes.cfg config file located at //infra/config/recipes.cfg
- (The hard-coded location is possibly not ideal, but it does keep things simple.)
- This cfg file conforms to recipes_cfg.proto, but also is parsed by simple_cfg.py.

The recipes.cfg contains a field recipes_path (aka $recipes_path for this doc) which is a path inside the repo of where the following can exist:

A recipes folder - contains entry point scripts (recipes) for the repo.
A recipe_modules folder - contains modules which may be depended on (used by) both recipe scripts as well as other modules (in this repo and any other repos which depend on it).

Additionally, recipes.cfg describes dependencies with a git URL, commit and fetch ref.

Repo loading

When a dev runs recipes.py in their repo (their repo's copy of recipes.py), it will find and parse the repo's recipes.cfg file, and identify the version of the recipe_engine repo that the repo currently depends on.

It will then bootstrap (with git) a clone of the recipe engine repo in the repo's $recipes_path/.recipe_deps/recipe_engine folder, and will invoke main.py in that clone with the --package argument pointing to the absolute path of the repo's recipes.cfg file.

Once main.py is running, it parses the -O overrides and the --package flags, and builds a RecipeDeps object which owns the whole $recipes_path/.recipe_deps folder. Constructing this object includes syncing (with git) all dependencies described in recipes.cfg. Every dependency will be checked out at $recipes_path/.recipe_deps/$dep_name.

*** note When dependencies are overridden on the command line with the -O flag, the path specified for the dependency is used verbatim as the root of that dependency repo; no git operations are performed.

This is the mechanism that the recipes.py bundle command employs to make a hermetic recipe bundle; it generates a recipes script which passes -O flags for ALL dependencies, causing the engine to run without doing any git operations.

The RecipeDeps object also traverses (by scanning the checked-out state) all the dependent repos to find their recipes and recipe_modules. It does not yet read the code inside the files.

At this point, the chosen recipe subcommand's main function (e.g. [run], [test], etc.) executes with the loaded RecipeDeps object, as well as any other command-line flags the subcommand has defined.

Some commands just work on the structure of the RecipeDeps object, but most will need to actually parse the recipe code from disk (e.g. to run it in one form or another).

Proto compilation

The recipe engine facilitates the use of protobufs with builtin protoc capabilities. This is all implemented in proto_support.py.

*** note For the purposes of bundled recipes, it's possible to completely skip the proto compilation step by using the --proto-override option to the engine. This is exactly what recipes.py bundle generates so that builders don't need to do any protoc activity on their startup.

Due to the nature of .proto imports, the generated python code (specifically w.r.t. the generated import lines), and the layout of recipes and modules (specifically, across multiple repos), is a bit more involved than just putting the .proto files in a directory, running 'protoc' and calling it a day.

After loading all the repos, the engine gathers and compiles any .proto files they contain into a single global namespace. The recipe engine looks for proto files in 4 places in a repo:

Under the recipe_modules directory
- Placed into the global namespace as recipe_modules/$repo_name/*.
Under the recipes directory
- Placed into the global namespace as recipes/$repo_name/*.
Under the recipe_engine directory (only in the actual recipe_engine repo).
- Placed into the global namespace as recipe_engine/*.
In a recipe_proto directory (adjacent to the 'recipes' and/or 'recipe_modules' directories).
- Placed directly into the global namespace.
- May not contain anything in the recipe_engine, recipes or recipe_modules subdirectories.

While the engine gathers all the proto files, it sorts them and generates a checksum of their contents. This is a SHA2 of the following:

RECIPE_PB_VERSION | NUL - The version of the recipe engine's compilation algorithm.
PROTOC_VERSION | NUL - The version of the protobuf library/compiler we're using.
repo_name | NUL - The name of the repo.

Then, for every .proto in the repo we hash:

relative_path_in_repo | NUL
relative_path_of_global_destination | NUL
githash_of_content | NUL

The githash_of_content is defined by git's "blob" hashing scheme (but is currently implemented in pure Python).

Once we've gathered all proto files and have computed the checksum, we verify the checksum against .recipe_deps/_pb/PB/csum. If it's the same, we conclude that the currently cached protos are the same as what we're about to compile.

If not, we copy all protos to a temporary directory reflecting their expected structure (see remarks about "global namespace" above). This structure is important to allow protoc to correctly resolve import lines in proto files, as well as to make the correct python import lines in the generated code.

Once the proto files are in place, we compile them all with protoc into another tempdir.

We then rewrite and rename all of the generated _pb2 files to change their import lines from:

from path.to.package import blah_pb2 as <unique_id_in_file>

to:

from PB.path.to.package import blah as <unique_id_in_file>

And rename them from *_pb2 to *. We also generate empty __init__.py files.

After this, we write csum, and do a rename-swap of this tempdir to .recipe_deps/_pb/PB. Finally, we put .recipe_deps/_pb onto sys.path.

Recipe Module loading

Modules are loaded by calling the RecipeModule.do_import() function. This is equivalent in all ways to doing:

from RECIPE_MODULES.repo_name import module_name

For example:

from RECIPE_MODULES.depot_tools import gclient

This import magic is accomplished by installing a PEP302 'import hook' on sys.meta_path. The hook is implemented in recipe_module_importer.py. Though this sounds scary, it's actually the least-scary way to implement the recipe module loading system, since it meshes with the way that python imports are actually meant to be extended. You can read PEP302 for details on how these hooks are meant to work, but the TL;DR is that they are an object with two methods, find_module and load_module. The first function is responsible for saying "Yes! I know how to import the module you're requesting", or "No, I have no idea what that is". The second function is responsible for actually loading the code for the module and returning the module object.

Our importer behaves specially:

RECIPE_MODULES - Returns an empty module marked as a 'package' (i.e., a module with submodules).
RECIPE_MODULES.repo_name - Verifies that the given project actually exists in RecipeDeps, then returns an empty module marked as a 'package'.
RECIPE_MODULES.repo_name.module_name - Verifies that the given module exists in this project, then uses imp.find_module and imp.load_module to actually do the loading. These are the bog-standard implementations for loading regular python modules.
RECIPE_MODULES.repo_name.module_name.... - All submodules are imported without any alteration using imp.find_module and imp.load_module.

Recipe loading

Recipe loading is substantially simpler than loading modules. The recipe .py file is exec'd with execfile, and then it's PROPERTIES dict (if any) is bound the same way as it is for Recipe Modules.

Instantiating 'api' objects

Now that we know how to load the code for modules and recipes, we need to actually instantiate them. This process starts at the recipe's DEPS description, and walks down the entire DEPS tree, instantiating recipe modules on the way back up (so, they're instantiated in topological order from bottom to top of the dependency tree).

Instantiation can either be done in 'API' mode or 'TEST_API' mode. 'API' mode is to generate the api object which is passed to RunSteps. 'TEST_API' mode is to generate the api object which is passed to GenTests. Both modes traverse the dependency graph the same way, but 'API' mode does a superset of the work (since all RecipeApi objects have a reference to their test_api as self.test_api).

Both RecipeTestApi and RecipeApi classes have an m member injected into them after construction, which contains all of the DEPS'd-in modules as members. So if a DEPS entry looks like:

DEPS = [
  "some_repo_name/module",
  "other_module",
]

Then the api and test_api instances will have an 'm' member which contains module and other_module as members, each of which is an instance of their respective instantiated api class.

As the loader walks up the tree, each recipe module's RecipeTestApi (if any) subclass is instantiated by calling its __init__ and then injecting its m object.

If the loader is in 'API' mode, then the module's RecipeApiPlan subclass is also instantiated, using the declared PROPERTIES as arguments to init, along with test_data, which may be provided if the api is being used from the recipes.py test subcommand to provide mock data for the execution of the test. The m object is injected, and then any UnresolvedRequirement objects are injected as well. Finally, after m has been injected and all UnresolvedRequirement objects are injected, the loader calls the instance's initialize() method to allow it to do post-dependency initialization.

*** note The UnresolvedRequirement objects are currently only used to provide limited 'pinhole' interfaces into the recipe engine, such as the ability to run a subprocess (step), or get access to the global properties that the recipe was started with, etc. Typically these are only used by a single module somewhere in the recipe_engine repo; user recipe modules are not expected to use these.

Simulation tests

This section talks about the code that implements the test command of recipes.py.

Post-process hooks

As part of the definition of a simulation test, the user can add post-process hooks to filter and/or make assertions on the expectations recorded for the test run. Hooks can be added using either the post_process or post_check methods of RecipeTestApi. The code that runs these hooks as well as the implementation of the check callable passed as the first argument to hooks is located in magic_check_fn.py.

The check callable passed to post-process hooks is an instance of Checker. The Checker class is responsible for recording failed checks, including determining the relevant stack frames to be included in the failure output.

The Checker is instantiated in post_process and assigned to a local variable. The local variable is important because the Checker object uses the presence of itself in the frame locals to define the boundary between engine code and post-process hook code. In the event of a failure, the Checker iterates over the stack frames, starting from the outermost frame and proceeding towards the current execution point. The first frame where the Checker appears in the frame locals is the last frame of engine code and the relevant frames begin starting at the next frame and excluding the 2 innermost frames (the __call__ method calls _call_impl which is where the frame walking takes place.

Failures may also be recorded in the case of a KeyError. KeyErrors are caught in post_process and the frames to be included in the failure are extracted from the exception info.

Once relevant frames are determined by Checker or post_process, Check.create is called to create a representation of the failure containing processed frames. The frames are converted to CheckFrame, a representation that holds information about the point in code that the frame refers to without keeping all of the frame locals alive.

Processing a frame involves extracting the filename, line number and function name from the frame and where possible reconstructing the expression being evaluated in that frame. To reconstruct the expression, CheckFrame maintains a cache that maps filename and line number to AST nodes corresponding to expressions whose definitions end at that line number. The end line is the line that will appear as the line number of a frame executing that expression. The cache is populated by parsing the source code into nodes and then examining the nodes. Nodes that define expressions or simple statements (statements that can't have additional nested statements) are added to the cache. Other statements result in nested statements or expressions being added to the queue. When a simple statement or expression is added to the cache, we also walk over all of its nested nodes to find any lambda definitions. Lambda definitions within a larger expression may result in line numbers in an execution frame that doesn't correspond with the line number of the larger expression, so in order to display code for frames that occur in lambdas we add them to the cache separately.

In the case of the innermost frame, the CheckFrame also includes information about the values of the variables and expressions relevant for determining the exact nature of the check failure. CheckFrame has a varmap field that is a dict mapping a string representation for a variable or expression to the value of that variable or expression (e.g. 'my_variable' -> 'foo'). The expression may not be an expression that actually appears in the code if the expression would actually be more useful than the actual expression in the code (e.g. some_dict.keys() will appear if the call check('x' in some_dict) fails because the values in some_dict aren't relevant to whether 'x' is in it). This varmap is constructed by the _checkTransformer class, which is a subclass of ast.NodeTransformer. ast.NodeTransformer is an instance of the visitor design pattern containing methods corresponding to each node subclass. These methods can be overridden to modify or replace the nodes in the AST.

_checkTransformer overrides some of these methods to replace nodes with resolved nodes where possible. Resolved nodes are represented by _resolved, a custom node subclass that records a string representation and a value for a variable or expression. It also records whether the node is valid. The node would not be valid if the recorded value doesn't correspond to the actual value in the code, which is the case if we replace an expression with an expression more useful for the user (e.g. showing only the keys of a dict when a membership check fails). The node types handled by _checkTransformer are:

Name nodes correspond to a variable or constant and have the following fields:
- id - string that acts as a key into one of frame locals, frame globals or builtins If id is one of the constants True, False and None the node is replaced with a resolved node with the name of the constant as the representation and the constant itself as the value. Otherwise, if the name is found in either the frame locals or the frame globals, the node is replaced with a resolved node with id as the representation and the looked up value as the value.
Attribute nodes correspond to an expression such as x.y and have the following fields:
- value - node corresponding to the expression an attribute is looked up on (x)
- attr - string containing the attribute to look up (y) If value refers to a resolved node, then we have been able to resolve the preceding expression and so we replace the node with a resolved node with the value of the lookup.
Compare nodes correspond to an expression performing a series of comparison operations and have the following fields:
- left - node corresponding the left-most argument of the comparison
- ops - sequence of nodes corresponding to the comparison operators
- cmps - sequence of nodes corresponding to the remaining arguments of the comparison The only change we make to Compare nodes is to prevent the full display of dictionaries when a membership check is performed; if the expression x in y fails when y is a dict, we do not actually care about the values of y, only its keys. If ops has only a single element that is an instance of either ast.In or ast.NotIn and cmps has only a single element that is a resolved node referring to a dict, then we make a node that replaces the cmps with a single resolved node with the dict's keys as its value. The new resolved node is marked not valid because we wouldn't expect operations that work against the dict to necessarily work against its keys.
Subscript nodes correspond to an expression such as x[y] and contains the following fields:
- value - node corresponding to the expression being indexed (x)
- slice - node corresponding to the subscript expression (y), which may be a simple index, a slice or an ellipsis If value is a valid resolved node and slice is a simple index (instance of ast.Index), then we attempt to create a resolved node with the value of the lookup as its value. We don't attempt a lookup if the value is an invalid resolved node because we would expect the lookup to raise an exception or return a different value then the actual code would. In the case that we do perform the lookup, it still may fail (e.g. check('x' in y and y['x'] == 'z') when 'x' is not in y). If the lookup fails and value is a dict, then we return a new invalid resolved node with the dict's keys as its value so that the user has some helpful information about what went wrong.

The nodes returned by the transformer are walked to find the resolved nodes and the varmap is populated mapping the resolved nodes' representations to their values that have been rendered in a user-friendly fashion.

How recipes are run

Once the recipe is loaded, the running subcommand (i.e. run, test, luciexe) selects a StreamEngine and a StepRunner. The StreamEngine is responsible for exporting the state of the running recipe to the outside world, and the StepRunner is responsible for running steps (or simulating them for tests).

Once the subcommand has selected the relevant engine and runner, it then hands control off to RecipeEngine.run_steps, which orchestrates the actual execution of the recipe (namely; running steps, handling errors and updating presentation via the StreamEngine).

StreamEngine

The StreamEngine's responsibility is to accept reports about the UI and data export ("output properties") state of the recipe, and channel them to an appropriate backend service which can render them. The UI backend is the LUCI service called "Milo", which runs on https://ci.chromium.org.

There are 2 primary implementations of the StreamEngine; one for the old @@@annotation@@@ protocol, and another which directly emits build.proto via logdog.

The entire recipe engine was originally written to support the @@@annotation@@@ protocol, and thus StreamEngine is very heavily informed by this. It assumes that all data is 'append only', and structures things as commands to a backend, rather than setting state on a persistent object and assuming that the StreamEngine will worry about state replication to the backend.

The 'build.proto' (LUCI) engine maps the command-oriented StreamEngine interface onto a persistent buildbucket.v2.Build protobuf message, and then replicates the state of this message to the backend via 'logdog' (which is LUCI's log streaming service).

Going forward the plan is to completely remove the @@@annotation@@@ engine in favor of the LUCI engine.

StepRunner

The StepRunner's responsibility is to translate between the recipe and the operating system (and by extension, anything outside of the memory of the process executing the recipe). This includes things like mediating access to the filesystem and actually executing subprocesses for steps. This interface is currently an ad-hoc collection of functions pertaining to the particulars of how recipes work today (i.e. the placeholder methods returning test data).

*** note TODO: Give StepRunner a full vfs-style interface; Instead of doing weird mocks in the path module for asserting that files exist, and having placeholder-specific data, the user could manipulate the state of the filesystem in their test and then the placeholders would be implemented against the (virtual) filesystem directly.

There are two implementations of the StepRunner; A "real" implementation and a "simulation" implementation.

The real implementation actually talks to the real filesystem and executes subprocesses when asked for the execution result of steps.

The simulation implementation supplies responses to the RecipeEngine for placeholder test data and step results.

One feature of the StepRunner implementations is that they don't raise exceptions; In particular the 'run' function should return an ExecutionResult even if the step crashes, doesn't exist or whatever other terrible condition it may have.

Running steps

Within a chunk of recipe user code, steps are executed sequentially. When a step runs (i.e. the recipe user code invokes api.step(...)), a number of things happens:

Inform the StepRunner that we're about to run the step
Create a new step_stream with the StreamEngine so the UI knows about the step.
Open a debug log '$debug'. The progress of the engine running the step will be recorded here, along with any exceptions raised.
Open a log "$execution details" which contains all the data associated with running the step (command, env, etc.) and also the final exit code of the step.
The engine renders all input placeholders attached to the step. This typically involves writing data to disk (but it depends on the placeholder implementation).
The engine runs the step to get an ExecutionResult.
The step's "initial status" is calculated. This is a function of running the step (its ExecutionResult) and also properties like ok_ret and infra_step.
The output placeholders are resolved.

If an exception is raised during this process it's logged (to $debug) and then saved while the engine does the final processing.

Currently, when a step has finished execution, its step_stream is kept open and the step is pushed onto a stack of ActiveSteps. Depending on the configuration of the step (ok_ret, infra_step, etc.) the engine will raise an exception back into user code. If something broke while running the step (like a bad placeholder, or the user asked to run a non-executable file... you know, the usual stuff), this exception will be re-raised after the engine finalizes the StepData, and sets up the presentation status (likely, "EXCEPTION").

Drawbacks of current presentation/exception handling implementation.

However, the step remains open until the next step runs!

The step's presentation can be accessed, and modified in a couple ways:

Via the return value of api.step()
Via the '.result' property of the caught StepFailure exception.
Via the magical api.step.active_result property.

The first one isn't too bad, but the last two are pretty awful. This means that a user of your module function can get access to your step result and:

Modify the presentation of your step
- (not too bad, though kinda weird... if the changes they make to your step don't mesh well with your own changes it'll look like you goofed something up).
Directly read the data results of your step's placeholders.
- Change your implementation to use 2 placeholders instead of one? Surprise! You've now broken all your downstream users.
- This is pretty bad.
Read the output properties from your step!
- Hey! Those were supposed to be write-only! What the heck?

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implementation_details.md

implementation_details.md

Recipe engine implementation details

Recipe engine subcommands

Loading

Repo configuration

Repo loading

Proto compilation

Recipe Module loading

Recipe loading

Instantiating 'api' objects

Simulation tests

Post-process hooks

How recipes are run

StreamEngine

StepRunner

Running steps

Drawbacks of current presentation/exception handling implementation.

Files

implementation_details.md

Latest commit

History

implementation_details.md

File metadata and controls

Recipe engine implementation details

Recipe engine subcommands

Loading

Repo configuration

Repo loading

Proto compilation

Recipe Module loading

Recipe loading

Instantiating 'api' objects

Simulation tests

Post-process hooks

How recipes are run

StreamEngine

StepRunner

Running steps

Drawbacks of current presentation/exception handling implementation.