Job Guidelines

Generic

• Job files shall be written following the pyATS job file template.

• Job files should have minimal programming logic.

• Job files shall contain and/or reference their required topology diagram drawings.

• Job files shall define a main() function as the entry point.

  from pyats.easypy import run
  def main(runtime):
  
      run(<script>)
  

Headers

• Job file shall contain a docstring header containing:

  • Owner, support email

  • Tasks/test suites to be run

  • Topology requirement

  • Input arguments and environment variable requirements.

Parameters

• Job files shall parse any job-file specific CLI arguments using python argparse, following pyATS argument propagation rules, and convert them into corresponding python objects.

  import argparse
  from pyats.easypy import run
  
  parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='example job file cli args parser')
  parser.add_argument('--argument_a',
                      help='example argument a',
                      default = None)
  parser.add_argument('--argument_b',
                      help='example argument b',
                      default = None)
  
  def main(runtime):
  
      custom_args = parser.parse_known_args()[0]
      run(<script>,
          arg_a = custom_args.argument_a,
          arg_b = custom_args.argument_b)
  

• Job files shall process any related environment input variables into task parameters.

• Job files shall allow a mechanism to allow default input variables/parameters to be overwritten by those from CLI and environment variables.

• Multiprocessing shared variable type parameters should be used if a task needs to propagate information back to its parent job file.

Tasks

• Tasks shall refer to their test suite using relative path instead of hard-coded paths.

• Tasks shall be started/stopped only within the main() function.

• All tasks shall be waited for until they either finish, or time out.

• Tasks that time out shall be terminated and reported for error.