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Failing steps

The development of a StepUp workflow is an interactive process, where it is common to have failing steps. These will result in screen output with a bright red FAIL message. At the end of a run, a warning message will be displayed that some steps have failed.

Here, we provide some guidance on how to handle failing steps.

  • Check the error message: The error message will often provide a clue to what went wrong. If your workflow is so large that the error message has scrolled out of view, you can always find the error message in the file .stepup/fail.log. When you open this file in VSCode or PyCharm, the file will be automatically reloaded when the workflow is rerun. (There is a similar file .stepup/warning.log for warnings.)

  • External causes: If the source of the problem is unrelated to STATIC files known to StepUp, fixing the problem will not result in a file change that StepUp can detect. Therefore, when you restart StepUp from scratch, it will automatically rerun previously failed steps. However, when working interactively with -w or -W, failed steps will not be rerun automatically.