create a run_all type action for a subset of actions

[wjchulme]

Is it possible to create an action that will run a set of earlier actions? In the same way that run_all does, except not for all actions.

It's not too useful on the job server because you can easily click all the relevant actions, but when running locally via opensafely run, often there is a set of actions that should be run together, but they each have to be run separately which can be a bit of a pain.

[wjchulme]

Before the run_all action was a built-in feature of openssafely run, it was defined explicitly in the project.yaml as follows:

  run_all:
    needs: [run_model, extract_data]
    run: cohortextractor:latest --version
    outputs:
      moderately_sensitive:
        whatever: project.yaml

This could be re-purposed -- just put all the relevant actions in the needs: section. You still need to have the action itself do something, hence the cohortextractor:latest --version. And since each action also needs to output something, the whatever: project.yaml is also necessary, but ignorable.

[julianmatthewman]

I'm also looking for a way to run a set of actions, however the approach of repurposing run_all doesn't seem to be working for me (after including the run_all action with my desired actions as needs it just runs all the code same as before). Is there any other way to run multiple actions locally?

[sebbacon]

I believe this approach will work too, but you'll need to call it something other than run_all

[evansd]

@wjchulme You can supply multiple action names to opensafely run

[julianmatthewman]

ah, so simple. Thanks!