Patch Note 2018-07-25 – Valohai Help

Summer is in full force here in beautiful Turku, Finland, but we're not letting that deter us from making the platform better! Here's what we've been up to...

Frontend/API Updates

The metadata chart view has been taught to merge data points based on the X axis key.
You can now print multiple metadatum entries with the same key and still have a readable chart.
The message view in the UI was cleaned up and prettified.
You know that thing that pops up from the top of the page when something happens? Well, it's a lot prettier and more useful now!
Also, no more bare "Failed" messages – we went through all messages with a fine comb to have them actually tell you what exactly was being attempted!
You can now use {parameter:...} and {parameter-value:...} in commands.
If you need to only pass a single parameter, or maybe export a parameter value as an environment value, now you can! export HELLO={parameter-value:hello}!
You can now review a given commit's configuration in the UI.
The commit hash in the execution detail view is now a link.
Deployment: SCRIPT_PREFIX is now exposed to your code.
If your deployed endpoint's URL is e.g. https://valohai.cloud/example/deployment/version/20180725.0/greet, the SCRIPT_PREFIX environment variable will be populated with the value https://valohai.cloud/example/deployment/version/20180725.0. This is useful for making any auxiliary URL routing you might have agnostic to deployment name and version.
If your framework is already aware of this environment variable (e.g. Django is), you might not need to do anything. If it's not, simply strip SCRIPT_PREFIX off the request path if it starts with the prefix.
Billing: now available in EUR too!
You can now request billing to occur in EUR to save on any possible conversion fees. Your invoices will also be EUR-valued from there on out, which, we've found, placates quite a few bookkeeper types here in the old world.
To have billing occur in EUR, please contact us using the in-app support system.
Executions and Tasks can now be given titles.
You can give a custom title to both executions and tasks, up to 100 characters (or emoji 😻). This is also available via the API, of course. Support in the CLI tool will be added soon.
The environment selection box was given a facelift.
Now you can see which cloud an execution environment is in, as well as details about the price and the capabilities of the environment.
Stderr events are no longer printed in red.
They're a much more readable (not to mention more zen, according to our spiritual consultants) yellow now.
Repositories no longer strictly require a valohai.yaml file.
A configuration file is still recommended.

Task Runner Updates

The internal task runner (codenamed Peon), was also taught a trick or two.

Feature: Downloading large inputs now has a meaningful progress meter.
Feature: The Valohai execution ID is now available as the VH_JOB_ID environment variable.
Feature: The amount of available scratch space on the executor machine is logged at the start of the execution.
Feature: The canonical image ID for the Docker image being used is now printed at the start of the execution. In particular, this is a Docker RepoDigest, if one is available.
Feature: Downloaded inputs are now directly mounted into the container. This makes using cached inputs a lot faster. As a side-effect, this means they're always actually read-only.
Bugfix: On occasion, containers that ran into certain out-of-memory situations (which we call "Sudden Container Existence Failure") were not properly reaped and would appear to be running, even if they really weren't. This was fixed by adding a separate house-trained watchdog.
Bugfix: EC2 will (probably) no longer scale instances down while they're initializing an execution.
Bugfix: Interrupted input downloads will no longer corrupt caches.

Valohai-CLI Updates

The CLI tool valohai-cli was also updated to version 0.7.

Feature: You can now use latest in place of most execution counter values, to refer to the latest execution created.
Feature: The YAML wizard now loads image suggestions from the valohai/images repository.
Feature: Input and parameter names containing spaces can now be used – an input named "test images" would be --test-images.
Feature: Input and parameter names are now spell-checked (at least slightly). No more referring to the YAML file if you miss a hyphen or mistype something!
Bugfix: The CLI no longer crashes when used with a newer version of Git (which has changed spellings of certain error messages).