History and provenance

See the history and provenance of your targets: what you ran, when you ran it, the function arguments you used, and how to get old data back.

drake_history(cache = NULL, history = NULL, analyze = TRUE, verbose = NULL)

Arguments

cache	drake cache as created by new_cache(). See also drake_cache().
history	Logical, whether to record the build history of your targets. You can also supply a txtq, which is how drake records history. Must be TRUE for drake_history() to work later.
analyze	Logical, whether to analyze drake_plan() commands for arguments to function calls. Could be slow because this requires parsing and analyzing lots of R code.
verbose	Deprecated on 2019-09-11.

Value

A data frame of target history.

Details

drake_history() returns a data frame with the following columns.

• target: the name of the target.

• current: logical, whether the row describes the data actually assigned to the target name in the cache, e.g. what you get with loadd(target) and readd(target). Does NOT tell you if the target is up to date.

• built: when the target's value was stored in the cache. This is the true creation date of the target's value, not the recovery date from make(recover = TRUE).

• exists: logical, whether the target's historical value still exists in the cache. Garbage collection via (clean(garbage_collection = TRUE) and drake_cache()$gc()) remove these historical values, but clean() under the default settings does not.

• hash: fingerprint of the target's historical value in the cache. If the value still exists, you can read it with drake_cache()$get_value(hash).

• command: the drake_plan() command executed to build the target.

• seed: random number generator seed.

• runtime: the time it took to execute the drake_plan() command. Does not include overhead due to drake's processing.

If analyze is TRUE, various other columns are included to show the explicitly-named length-1 arguments to function calls in the commands. See the "Provenance" section for more details.

Provenance

If analyze is TRUE, drake scans your drake_plan() commands for function arguments and mentions them in the history. A function argument shows up if and only if: 1. It has length 1.
2. It is atomic, i.e. a base type: logical, integer, real, complex, character, or raw.
3. It is explicitly named in the function call, For example, x is detected as 1 in fn(list(x = 1)) but not f(list(1)). The exceptions are file_out(), file_in(), and knitr_in(). For example, filename is detected as "my_file.csv" in process_data(filename = file_in("my_file.csv")). NB: in process_data(filename = file_in("a", "b")) filename is not detected because the value must be atomic.

Examples

if (FALSE) {
isolate_example("contain side-effects", {
if (requireNamespace("knitr", quietly = TRUE)) {
# First, let's iterate on a drake workflow.
load_mtcars_example()
make(my_plan, history = TRUE, verbose = 0L)
# Naturally, we'll make updates to our targets along the way.
reg2 <- function(d) {
  d$x2 <- d$x ^ 3
  lm(y ~ x2, data = d)
}
Sys.sleep(0.01)
make(my_plan, history = TRUE, verbose = 0L)
# The history is a data frame about all the recorded runs of your targets.
out <- drake_history(analyze = TRUE)
print(out)
# Let's use the history to recover the oldest version
# of our regression2_small target.
oldest_reg2_small <- max(which(out$target == "regression2_small"))
hash_oldest_reg2_small <- out[oldest_reg2_small, ]$hash
cache <- drake_cache()
cache$get_value(hash_oldest_reg2_small)
# If you run clean(), drake can still find all the targets.
clean(small)
drake_history()
# But if you run clean() with garbage collection,
# older versions of your targets may be gone.
clean(large, garbage_collection = TRUE)
drake_history()
invisible()
}
})
}