Feature suggestion: on-demand job trigger

[aronsky]

It would be very convenient to be able to execute jobs on-demand (for testing, etc.). This is especially true, if the job is not just a simple command, but requires setting the working directory, some environment variables, and so on - executing such a job via a simple reference to its name on the deck-chores container would be a lot easier than building the correct "docker exec" (or its swarm equivalent) command.

Unfortunately, looking at the code of deck-chores, I don't see a good place to integrate such functionality. Using signals won't work, since Python doesn't pass any arguments to the signal handler.

The only spot I could think of (without some extra development of RPC support in deck-chores) is the events listener: it can be abused by looking at, e.g., exec events on the deck-chores container, and parsing out the name of the job to trigger from the command (which will obviously fail). Convoluted, I know.

If you think it's a good feature, I'm open to discussion as to how to implement it.

[funkyfuture]

ciao, thanks for your proposal. i think there was a similar request once. i certainly don't have the time to implement such feature, other concerns for this project are of higher priority to me as well.

what about re-designing the cli-interface to introduce the subcommands daemon and run? with no provided subcommand, it would invoke the daemon command and behave as it does currently.

i'm assuming that this doens't require a larger refactoring and would allow to re-use most required code. and it isn't hackish as interface.

for the run command, the interface could be deck-chores run CONTAINER JOB....

one thing that users may bring up once this feature is available, is that they want to define jobs without a time-based trigger. this shouldn't be a problem.

some people may ask to expose configuration options via cli, but i'd be hesitant to that.

i don't care whether you open a pull request with a wip state to get early feedback or a completely implemented solution. thorough reviews are guaranteed!

[aronsky]

Sounds good! I'll start working on it in my free time and open a PR once basic functionality is there (might take a while :) ).