Process Control

March 18, 2024 ยท View on GitHub

pynonymizer may be useful to you as a complete process or in part. For example, you might not want the database to be dropped at the end of the process, so you can query it later.

Pynonymize offers a few of options for controlling the process.

  --start-at STEP       Choose a step to begin the process (inclusive).
                        [$PYNONYMIZER_START_AT]
  --skip-steps STEP [STEP ...]
                        Choose one or more steps to skip.
                        [$PYNONYMIZER_SKIP_STEPS]
  --stop-at STEP        Choose a step to stop at (inclusive).
                        [$PYNONYMIZER_STOP_AT]
  --only-step STEP      Choose one step to perform.
                        [$PYNONYMIZER_ONLY_STEP]

Steps

Pynonymizer's process is broken into steps:

  • START: NOOP action, first
  • CREATE_DB: Create the named database
  • RESTORE_DB: Restore the database from input
  • ANONYMIZE_DB: Run the anonymization process
  • DUMP_DB: Dump the database to output
  • DROP_DB: Drop the named database
  • END: NOOP, last

Control

Essentially: steps can be run, or they can be skipped.

There are a few ways a step can be skipped:

  • --start-at is set to a value after the current step
  • --stop-at is set to a step before the current step
  • --skip-steps includes the current step
  • --only-step does not include the current step.

If a step is skipped it will be logged as a warning, but the process will complete successfully as long as the remaining steps do.

Examples

  • Keep a database afer anonymization: pynonymizer [...] --stop-at DUMP_DB
  • Anonymize pynonymizer [...] --db-name sakila --only-step ANONYMIZE_DB
  • Restore pynonymizer [...] --db-name sakila --only-step RESTORE_DB