This lesson is in the early stages of development (Alpha version)

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Introduction to Workflows with Common Workflow Language

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CWL and Shell Tools

Overview

Teaching: 0 min
Exercises: 0 min
Questions

  • What is the difference between a CWL tool description and a CWL workflow?

  • How can we create a tool descriptor?

  • How can we use this in a single step workflow?

Objectives

  • describe the relationship between a tool and its corresponding CWL document

  • exercise good practices when naming inputs and outputs

  • understand how to reference files for input and output

  • explain that only files explicitly mentioned in a description will be included in the output of a step/workflow

  • implement bulk capturing of all files produced by a step/workflow for debugging purposes

  • use STDIN and STDOUT as input and output

  • capture output written to a specific directory, the working directory, or the same directory where input is located

CWL workflows are written in the YAML syntax. This short tutorial explains the parts of YAML used in CWL. A CWL document contains the workflow and the requirements for running that workflow. All CWL documents should start with two lines of code:

cwlVersion: v1.2
class:

The cwlVersion string defines which standard of the language is required for the tool or workflow. The most recent version is v1.2.

The class field defines what this particular document is. The majority of CWL documents will fall into one of two classes: CommandLineTool, or Workflow. The CommandLineTool class is used for describing the interface for a command-line tool, while the Workflow class is used for connecting those tool descriptions into a workflow. In this lesson the differences between these two classes are explained, how to pass data to and from command-line tools and specify working environments for these, and finally how to use a tool description within a workflow.

You should follow the examples in this lesson from your novice-tutorial-exercises directory.

$ cd novice-tutorial-exercises

Our first CWL script

To demonstrate the basic requirements for a tool descriptor a CWL description for the popular “Hello world!” demonstration will be examined.

echo.cwl

cwlVersion: v1.2
class: CommandLineTool

baseCommand: echo

inputs:
  message_text:
    type: string
    inputBinding:
      position: 1

outputs: []

Next, the input file: hello_world.yml.

hello_world.yml

message_text: Hello world!

We will use the reference CWL runner, cwltool to run this CWL document (the .cwl workflow file) along with the .yml input file.

cwltool echo.cwl hello_world.yml

INFO Resolved 'echo.cwl' to 'file:///.../echo.cwl'
INFO [job echo.cwl] /private/tmp/docker_tmprm65mucw$ echo \
    'Hello world!'
Hello world!
INFO [job echo.cwl] completed success
{}
INFO Final process status is success

The output displayed above shows that the program has run successfully and its output, Hello world!.

Let’s take a look at the echo.cwl script in more detail.

As explained above, the first 2 lines are always the same, the CWL version and the class of the script are defined. In this example the class is CommandLineTool, in particular the echo command. The next line, baseCommand, contains the command that will be run (echo).

inputs:
  message_text:
    type: string
    inputBinding:
       position: 1

This block of code contains the inputs section of the tool description. This section provides all the inputs that are needed for running this specific tool. To run this example we will need to provide a string which will be included on the command line. Each of the inputs has a name, to help us tell them apart; this first input has the name : message_text. The field inputBinding is one way to specify how the input should appear on the command line. Here the position field indicates at which position the input will be on the command line; in this case the message_text value will be the first thing added to the command line (after the baseCommand, echo).

outputs: []

Lastly the outputs of the tool description. This example doesn’t have a formal output. The text is printed directly in the terminal. So an empty YAML list ([]) is used as the output.

Script order

To make the script more readable the input field is put in front of the output field. However CWL syntax requires only that each field is properly defined, it does not require them to be in a particular order.

Changing input text

What do you need to change to print a different text on the command line?

Solution

To change the text on the command line, you only have to change the text in the hello_world.yml file.

For example:

message_text: Good job!

CWL single step workflow

The RNA-seq data from the introduction episode will be used for the first CWL workflow. The first step of RNA-sequencing analysis is a quality control of the RNA reads using the fastqc tool. This tool is already available to use so there is no need to write a new CWL tool description.

This is the workflow file (rna_seq_workflow_1.cwl).

rna_seq_workflow_1.cwl

cwlVersion: v1.2
class: Workflow

inputs:
  rna_reads_fruitfly: File

steps:
  quality_control:
    run: bio-cwl-tools/fastqc/fastqc_2.cwl
    in:
      reads_file: rna_reads_fruitfly
    out: [html_file]

outputs:
  quality_report:
    type: File
    outputSource: quality_control/html_file

In a workflow the steps field must always be present. The workflow tasks or steps that you want to run are listed in this field. At the moment the workflow only contains one step: quality_control. In the next episodes more steps will be added to the workflow.

Let’s take a closer look at the workflow. First the inputs field will be explained.

inputs:
  rna_reads_fruitfly: File

Looking at the CWL script of the fastqc tool, it needs a fastq file as its input. In this example the fastq file consists of Drosophila melanogaster RNA reads. So we call the variable rna_reads_fruitfly and it has File as its type. To make this workflow interpretable for other researchers, self-explanatory and sensible variable names are used.

Input and output names

It is very important to give inputs and outputs a sensible name. Try not to use variable names like inputA or inputB because others might not understand what is meant by it.

The next part of the script is the steps field.

steps:
  quality_control:
    run: bio-cwl-tools/fastqc/fastqc_2.cwl
    in:
      reads_file: rna_reads_fruitfly
    out: [html_file]

Every step of a workflow needs a name, the first step of the workflow is called quality_control. Each step needs a run field, an in field and an out field. The run field contains the location of the CWL file of the tool to be run. The in field connects the inputs field to the fastqc tool. The fastqc tool has an input parameter called reads_file, so it needs to connect the reads_file to rna_reads_fruitfly. Lastly, the out field is a list of output parameters from the tool to be used. In this example, the fastqc tool produces an output file called html_file.

The last part of the script is the output field.

outputs:
  quality_report:
    type: File
    outputSource: quality_control/html_file

Each output in the outputs field needs its own name. In this example the output is called qc_html. Inside qc_html the type of output is defined. The output of the quality_control step is a file, so the qc_html type is File. The outputSource field refers to where the output is located, in this example it came from the step quality_control and it is called html_file.

When you want to run this workflow, you need to provide a file with the inputs the workflow needs. This file is similar to the hello_world.yml file in the previous section. The input file is called workflow_input_1.yml

workflow_input_1.yml

rna_reads_fruitfly:
  class: File
  location: rnaseq/GSM461177_2_subsampled.fastqsanger
  format: http://edamontology.org/format_1930  # FASTA

In the input file the values for the inputs that are declared in the inputs section of the workflow are provided. The workflow takes rna_reads_fruitfly as an input parameter, so we use the same variable name in the input file. When setting inputs, the class of the object needs to be defined, for example class: File or class: Directory. The location field contains the location of the input file, in this case it is a local path, but we could have directly used the original url location: https://zenodo.org/record/4541751/files/GSM461177_2_subsampled.fastqsanger In this example the last line is needed to provide a format for the fastq file.

Now you can run the workflow using the following command:

cwltool --cachedir cache rna_seq_workflow_1.cwl workflow_input_1.yml

...
Analysis complete for GSM461177_2_subsampled.fastqsanger
INFO [job quality_control] Max memory used: 179MiB
INFO [job quality_control] completed success
INFO [step quality_control] completed success
INFO [workflow ] completed success
{
    "quality_report": {
        "location": "file:///.../GSM461177_2_subsampled.fastqsanger_fastqc.html",
        "basename": "GSM461177_2_subsampled.fastqsanger_fastqc.html",
        "class": "File",
        "checksum": "sha1$e820c530b91a3087ae4c53a6f9fbd35ab069095c",
        "size": 378324,
        "path": "/.../GSM461177_2_subsampled.fastqsanger_fastqc.html"
    }
}
INFO Final process status is success

Cache Directory

To save intermediate results for re-use later we use --cachedir cache; where cache is the directory for storing the cache (it can be given any name, here we are just using cache for simplicity). You can safely delete the cache directory anytime, if you need to reclaim the disk space.

Exercise

Needs some exercises

Key Points

  • A tool description describes the interface to a command line tool.

  • A workflow describes which command line tools to use in one or more steps.

  • A tool descriptor is defined using the ComandLineTool class.

  • FIXME: How can we use a tool descriptor in a single step workflow?

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