A First Basic Workflow

Let’s create a job that uses the lolcow image from Docker Hub to run the fortune command and produce a random fortune/quote/joke. We’ll start by showing the steps to create the most basic workflow possible and then we will build on that workflow to create something more complex in later sections.

After logging in to Fuzzball and selecting your account, navigate to the “Workflow Editor” by clicking the menu item on the left and then select “Create New”.

image of workflow editor starting screen

Workflows are composed of 1 or more jobs. So we should start by adding a job to this workflow. Click the plus sign in the lower-right corner and drag and drop a new box into the central grid. A dialog box will open asking you to name the job.

dialog box for naming the newly created job

After you do so, you will see a menu with several tabs open to the right.

You can start by adding a new command in the “Job” tab. Click the “Add” button.

pointer next to the add button under Command in the Job tab

The first 2 commands will cause the command line to be prepended with the string /bin/sh -c. Do not alter these. This allows you to pass an arbitrary string in the third box that will be executed as a command by the default shell within the container.

As we said above, we will create a job that generates text using the Fortune program. So add the fortune command like so:

new text box allowing addition of the command fortune

Now you can click on the “Environment” tab to configure the environment that this job will run in.

the environment tab in the job menu

The only thing that you absolutely need to provide is a URI to a container image that supports your job. Here we will use the famous lolcow image from Docker Hub because it includes the fortune command. We will use the SIF version of this image by specifying that we want to download it using the ORAS protocol and specifying the sif tag. (This tag is specific to the lolcow image.)

Enter the following text to pull the correct container:

oras://godlovedc/lolcow:sif

dialog box showing the path to the lolcow image on Docker Hub

Now you can click on the “Resources” tab to finish the configuration necessary to run a basic workflow.

the resources tab in the job menu

The bare minimum configuration includes a specification for the number of cores and the amount of memory to use. 1 core and 1GB memory will be sufficient to execute the fortune command.

the resources tab with 1 core and 1GB memory set

At this point you can save the settings and run the job with the triangular button at the bottom of the workflow grid. After optionally naming your job, you can proceed to the the workflow. When completed, you will see something like the following:

the completed fortune workflow with logs

You can see the Fuzzfile at any time from the Workflow Editor by clicking the ellipsis menu in the lower right of the workflow grid and selecting “Edit YAML” or by pressing “e” on your keyboard. You can also view the Fuzzfile by clicking on the “Definition” tab in the “Workflows” dashboard. In the example here, the Fuzzfile that is generated by the Workflow Editor looks like this.

version: v1
jobs:
  fortune:
    image:
      uri: oras://godlovedc/lolcow:sif
    command:
      - /bin/sh
      - '-c'
      - fortune
    resource:
      cpu:
        cores: 1
      memory:
        size: 1GB

If you want to replicate this or any of the workflows in these examples, but you don’t want to manually recreate them using the Workflow Editor, you can always copy and paste this text into a file and open the file in the Workflow Editor. Or you can just press “e” to open the text editor window in the Workflow Editor and paste in this text!

The next section will expand on this basic Fuzzfile to create a workflow that runs multiple jobs (with dependencies) and adds a Storage Volume to share data between jobs.