alice/docs/runners.md

Runners

Runners are responsible to execute a list of commands in a set environment defined in the CI yaml file.

List of runners

• Python - executes python commands in a virtual environment
• Docker - executes each job in a separate Docker container - unimplemented

Import schema

What you need to do to make Alice recognise and import your custom Runners TODO

Runner API

Each runner has to support the following functions:

init(params, user_defaults)

• params: dict of runtime variables for the program itself.
• user_defaults: raw data from the CI file's global dict, augmented with an "env" dict, which contains environment variables from the host sytem, the CLI params and the pipeline global config, and the "workdir" value, which is the absolute path of the directory that the runner shall recognize as the current working directory.

Params

Currently the only param used is the dict is "verbose", whichis a boolean. The intended purpose is to show debug output if set to True.

Workdir

workdir can be assigned at CI yaml level as global Order: By default: os.cwd() if overwritten in global ------------------------------- Below this level is the runner's responsibility if owerwritten in runner config if overwritten in job

Runner shall receive the current working directory, unless stated otherwise in global config

update_config(config)

The function takes the raw data from the parsed yaml under runners.(runnername). Handling its own config is the sole responsibility of the runner. This function may be called at any point of the running lifecycle, so the runner has to support changing its own configuration.

run(job_spec)

This function executes one job attributed ith the type of the runner called. As the only hard requirement for Alice is the "type" field in a job (or the optional "changes"), everything else is handled by the runner.