Reference material

Interpretation of ‘state’ of FWs and WFs

Recall that a Workflow is a composed of one or more FireWorks. Both FireWorks and Workflows have a state (status).

You can get the states of FireWorks and Workflows using LaunchPad queries or through the web interface.

FireWorks states

A Firework state represents the status of a single job.

State	Meaning
ARCHIVED	Similar to deleted. The Firework will not run, and its launches are archived (won’t be used in duplicate checking). However, you can still query the Firework. More information here.
DEFUSED	The Firework is canceled/paused. Child FireWorks won’t run (although siblings might). The Firework can be resumed (reignited) later. More information here.
WAITING	The Firework is waiting for a parent Firework to complete. The Rocket Launcher will not pull this Firework until parent jobs complete.
READY	This Firework is ready to run, but hasn’t started running yet. The Rocket Launcher must pull this job and start running it.
RESERVED	(Queue Launcher in reservation mode only). The Firework is waiting in a queue to run. More information here.
FIZZLED	The Firework has failed; it was executed but threw an error during the process. It can be rerun if desired - more information here.
RUNNING	The Firework is currently running. Note that in catastrophic cases, a Firework may display this state even though it has crashed; more information here.
COMPLETED	The Firework has successfully finished running.

Workflows states

The state of a Workflow depends on the states of its component FireWorks.

State	Meaning
ARCHIVED	Similar to deleted. All the individual Firework states are ARCHIVED.
COMPLETED	All the individual Firework states are COMPLETED - the workflow is finished.
DEFUSED	At least one Firework in the workflow is DEFUSED. (If you have a branching workflow, other FireWorks might be running).
FIZZLED	At least one Firework in the workflow is FIZZLED and no FWs are DEFUSED. (If you have a branching workflow, other FireWorks might be running).
RUNNING	At least one Firework is RUNNING or COMPLETED. This state means that workflow has started but is not yet fully complete.
RESERVED	No FireWorks are RUNNING or COMPLETED, but at least one Firework has been submitted to the queue.
READY	The workflow has not started running and no FireWorks are reserved to run.

Reserved keywords in FW spec

The FW spec has certain reserved keywords that indicate special instructions to the FireWorks software. They are listed below:

Keyword	Meaning
_tasks	Reserved for specifying the list of Firetasks in the spec.
_priority	Used to specify the job’s priority. More information here.
_pass_job_info	This will pass a dictionary with keys [“fw_id”, “fw_name”, “launch_dir”] to the “_job_info” key. More information here.
_launch_dir	Pre-specify the directory to run the job rather than using default FW directory. More information here.
_fworker	Used to control what resources run this job. More information here.
_category	Used to control what resources run this job. More information here.
_queueadapter	Special queue parameters for this job. More information here.
_add_fworker	Embeds FireWorker (fireworker) variable inside the Firetask just before runtime.
_add_launchpad_and_fw_id	Embeds LaunchPad (launchpad) and fw_id (fw_id) variables inside the Firetask just before runtime. Not best practice but maybe useful.
_dupefinder	Used to specify a duplicate finder object for avoiding duplicated runs. More information here.
_allow_fizzled_parents	Run this Firework if all parents are either COMPLETED or FIZZLED.
_preserve_fworker	Run the children on the same FireWorker as the parent
_job_info	Reserved for automatically putting information about previous jobs via the _pass_job_info option.
_fizzled_parents	Reserved for automatically putting information about FIZZLED parents in a child Firework with the _allow_fizzled_parents option.
_trackers	Reserved for specifying Trackers.
_background_tasks	Reserved for specifying BackgroundTasks
_fw_env	Reserved for setting worker-specific environment variables. More information here.
_files_in	Reserved for specifying a dict of {name: filename} for input files to be copied from preceding FW.
_files_out	Reserved for specifying a dict of {name, output file name} that can be copied by a child FW.
_files_prev	Reserved for storing the actual full filepaths if _files_out is specified.