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Impact Engine (CLI)

Introduction​

if-run is a command line tool that computes IMP files. It is the portal allowing users to interact with the Impact Framework.

The available options and their shortcuts are:

  • --manifest or -m: path to an input IMP file
  • --output or -o (optional): path to the output file where the results as saved
  • --no-output or -n (optional): suppress the output to console
  • --help or -h: prints out help instruction
  • --debug: enables IF execution logs
  • --append: allows you to rerun an already-computed IMP and append new values to the existing data.
  • --observe: runs only observe phases of the IMP execution
  • --regroup: runs only regroup phases of the IMP execution
  • --compute: runs only compute phases of the IMP execution

The only required command is --manifest. Without a valid path to an IMP file, if-run has nothing to execute.

To use if-run, you must first write an IMP file. Then, you can simply pass the path to the IMP file to if-run on the command line.

if-run --manifest /my-imp.yml
## or using aliases
if-run -m /my-imp.yml

You can also pass a path where you would like to save the output file to. For example:

if-run --manifest ./my-imp.yml --output ./my-results.yml
## or using aliases
if-run -m ./my-imp.yml -o ./my-results.yml

If you omit the --output command, your results will only be displayed in the console.

For more information on the if-run commands see the CLI reference documentation.

Phased execution​

To enable greener and more flexible use of IF, we separate the IMP execution into distinct phases: observe, regroup and compute. This is invisible to you when you run if-run but behind the scenes all three of these phases are being run. However, you can instruct IF to run these phases individually, to avoid recomputing parts of the IMP unnecessarily. To do this, you simply pass --observe, --regroup, and --compute flags to IF in the combination you need. For example, to run only the observe phase (to generate input data):

if-run -m <imp> --observe

to run the compute phase on its own:

if-run -m <imp> --compute

To run the observe and compute phases without regrouping:

if-run -m <imp> --observe --compute