Toil Debugging

Toil has a number of tools to assist in debugging. Here we provide help in working through potential problems that a user might encounter in attempting to run a workflow.

Introspecting the Jobstore

Note: Currently these features are only implemented for use locally (single machine) with the fileJobStore.

To view what files currently reside in the jobstore, run the following command:

$ toil debug-file file:path-to-jobstore-directory --listFilesInJobStore

When run from the commandline, this should generate a file containing the contents of the job store (in addition to displaying a series of log messages to the terminal). This file is named “jobstore_files.txt” by default and will be generated in the current working directory.

If one wishes to copy any of these files to a local directory, one can run for example:

$ toil debug-file file:path-to-jobstore --fetch overview.txt *.bam *.fastq --localFilePath=/home/user/localpath

To fetch overview.txt, and all .bam and .fastq files. This can be used to recover previously used input and output files for debugging or reuse in other workflows, or use in general debugging to ensure that certain outputs were imported into the jobStore.

Stats and Status

See Stats Command for more about gathering statistics about job success, runtime, and resource usage from workflows.

Using a Python debugger

If you execute a workflow using the --debugWorker flag, Toil will not fork in order to run jobs, which means you can either use pdb, or an IDE that supports debugging Python as you would normally. Note that the --debugWorker flag will only work with the singleMachine batch system (the default), and not any of the custom job schedulers.