Workflow Visualization

BEE includes a simple visualization tool for viewing BEE workflows locally. This can be installed on a local macOS or Linux-based system using the JavaScript package manager npm. We plan to make a binary release of this in the future for ease of use.

Before attempting to use this tool, you’ll need to have BEE running on a cluster you have SSH access to from your local machine. Submit a workflow and record the workflow ID, or simply keep track of the ID of an already submitted workflow.

IMPORTANT: the version of BEE on the cluster must be the same as the visualization tool installed locally.

Installation

First, get an updated clone of the BEE repository, or grab a release tarball matching the version you have installed on the cluster. Install npm following their installation guide. This should be easy to do using your distro’s package manager, or using brew on macOS.

Making sure that you’re in the beeflow/enhanced_client directory, you can then install everything with npm install. If your local machine is connected to a VPN or uses a proxy, you may need to temporarily disable it. Also take a look at the README in that directory if you need more information.

Running

From the frontend where BEE has been launched, you need to run beeflow metadata ${WF_ID}, where WF_ID is the ID of a submitted workflow. You can safely ignore all the information displayed here, except for the bolt_port option which will be needed later.

On your local machine, given that everything is installed, you can now run npm start, all in the same beeflow/enhanced_client directory. This will show a screen that looks like this:

Along the left-hand side you’ll see a form containing three fields. Fill in the the hostname and moniker for the given frontend that BEE is running on (it must be the exact frontend, otherwise this will fail). Then enter the bolt port value that should have been saved earlier. Click connect and after a few seconds the right-hand window should populate with a workflow visual.

If any error boxes appear, check your connection and VPN set up. It’s possible that something may be blocking the visual client from connecting to BEE. The way this currently works is by opening up an SSH tunnel to the frontend on which BEE is running; if you’re able to SSH to that frontend from the same local machine, then the BEE visualization tool should also be able to.