Quickstart

Glossary

• Arca - name of the library. When written as Arca, the main interface class is being referenced.
• Task - definition of the function (callable), consists of a reference to the object and arguments.
• Backend - a way of running tasks.

Example

To run a Hello World example you’ll only need the arca.Arca and arca.Task classes. Task is used for defining the task that’s supposed to be run in the repositories. Arca takes care of all the settings and provides the basic API for running the tasks.

Let’s say we have the following file, called hello_world.py, in a repository https://example.com/hello_word.git, on branch master.

def say_hello():
   return "Hello World!"

To call the function using Arca, the following example would do so:

from arca import Arca, Task

task = Task("hello_world:say_hello")
arca = Arca()

result = arca.run("https://example.com/hello_word.git", "master", task)
print(result.output)

The code would print Hello World!.

result would be a Result instance. Result has three attributes, output with the return value of the function call, stdout and stderr contain things printed to the standard outputs (see the section about Result for more info about the capture of the standard outputs). If the task fails, arca.exceptions.BuildError would be raised.

By default, the Current Environment Backend is used to run tasks, which uses the current Python, launching the code in a subprocess. You can learn about backends here.