Manual steps

Sometimes there are steps in a pipeline that are too cumbersome to automate, but are not complex enough to warrant defining an entire procedure. Or maybe they will not need to be iterated much, so automation would not be worth the trouble.

For example, imagine you want to save a mesh snapshot image from a CFD simulation using ParaView. You can use the calkit manual-step command to pause the pipeline, execute a command to open ParaView, and display a message with instructions.

stages:
  save-mesh-snapshot-isometric:
    cmd: >
      calkit manual-step
      --cmd
      "touch sim/cases/k-epsilon-ny-40/case.foam && paraview sim/cases/k-epsilon-ny-40/case.foam"
      --message
      "Save isometric mesh image to figures/rans-mesh-snapshot-isometric.png"
    deps:
      - sim/cases/k-epsilon-ny-40/constant/polyMesh
    outs:
      - figures/rans-mesh-snapshot-isometric.png
    meta:
      calkit:
        type: figure
        title: RANS simulation mesh snapshot
        description: A snapshot of the RANS simulation mesh.

After confirming, DVC will check that the defined outputs exist, and if so, continue with the pipeline execution.