Minion is a light-weight workflow manager designed for CLI usage and maximum customisation.

A Minion job is a YAML file that uses special tags to define a function that can be run with parameters specified on the command line. The function defines a pipeline that can map, for example, issues in GitHub to cards in Trello.

pip install git+https://github.com/mkjpryor-stfc/minion-tasks.git

It is recommended to install Minion into its own Python virtual environment. Python 3 is required (tested on Python 3.6 only).

Once installed, the minion command will be available. Please use minion --help to explore the available commands and options.

Of particular interest is minion config-sources, which will print the directories in which Minion will search for job definitions in its current configuration.

minion list will list the available jobs, and minion run is used to run a specific job. Job parameters can be provided using parameter files in YAML format, or by specifying a YAML-formatted string on the command line.

In order to keep your workflows up-to-date, you can use a Cron job to execute minion run commands.

A useful pattern for configuration is the following:

• Store job definitions either in one of the directories listed by minion config-sources or in a directory specified using the MINION_JOB_DIRS environment variable, which could be set in your .bash_profile (or similar).
• Define provider credentials in a single YAML file that is used by all jobs, e.g.:

  github:
    api_token: <GitHub Personal Access Token>
  
  trello:
    api_key: <Trello API key>
    api_token: <Trello API token>
  

  This file can be specified using the MINION_PARAMS_FILES environment variable, which could also be set in your .bash_profile (or similar).
• Specify job-specific parameters on the command line, e.g.:

  minion run \
    -p "{trello: {board_name: 'Trello board name', list_name: 'Trello list name'}}" \
    assigned_issues_to_trello
  

Jobs are defined using a YAML-based DSL. For examples, see the examples directory.

There are four custom tags used by Minion: