Locating Outputs

Overview

The location of output files produced by workflow runs is determined at the level of the workflow engine configuration. Workbench itself does not handle, move, or copy the files at any point. However, for convenience, the monitoring details page for a given workflow run does provide a list of the corresponding output files (with full path) as reported by the engine.

If you wish to move or copy output files to a different location, you will need to use an appropriate method or utility as recommended by the storage provider and/or your IT administrator.

Step-by-step instructions

This procedure assumes you have run a workflow to completion, and that you are looking at the run details page for that workflow. If you have navigated away from that page, go to the “Monitor” page and find the run you are interested in as described in Running and Monitoring a Workflow Run.

• Step 1: Click on the “Outputs” tab to view the list of outputs, which is structured in JSON format. Each output is listed as a key:value pair. The key is the name of the corresponding output variable as defined in the WDL workflow, and the value of the output. In the case of File-type outputs, the value is the full path to the file.

  Example: "test.hello.response": "gs://workspaces-wes-staging/test/f00d7a09-49b3-4a0f-9d53-fdc5683cb792/call-hello/stdout"

Tip: For files stored on the cloud, the file path prefix indicates the cloud platform, as follows:

• gs:// for Google Cloud

• s3:// for Amazon Web Services

• No prefix for Microsoft Azure

• Step 2: You can retrieve the JSON file or copy its contents by clicking either the “Download” button or the “Copy” button, respectively (bottom left of the panel). This is intended to facilitate accessing or retrieving the files programmatically.