Running with a file containing parameters

Warning

The keyword --parameters_file is not to be confused with --param_file which is used to specify command-line arguments that can possibily vary. Yes, I know it can be confusing and it may be changed later (due to lazyness from the author at this point in time).

Sometimes command-line arguments are not handy to set-up your simulation and you’d rather use a parameters file where you store all the relevant variables, definitions and so on. You still want to keep track of this file as for the command-line arguments case. To handle this, Qanat has a special option: --parameters_file. If you use this option when running and experiment, Qanat will copy this file into the storage_path directory when running the experiment. For example:

qanat experiment run <experiment_name> --parameters_file <yourfile> [OPTIONS]

where OPTIONS are the usual options to describe the runs, runner, container, etc.

Warning

The file could be anything (YAML, JSON or even another python file) but your executing script should parse it using exactly the option --parameters_file.

When using the qanat experiment run_explore <experiment_name> <run_id> command, an option is then added to visualize the parameters file’s content.

Warning

Obviously, do not modify this copied file in the results directory. You would discard any reproducibility.