"Execute in place" support for cirrus-cli

[anarazel]

Hi,

Right now cirrus-cli can't, as far as I can tell, be used for VM based tasks, because it wants to start a container. Nor can it be used to manually start a task when already in the target environment, e.g. when debugging a hard to reproduce problem.

It'd be nice if cirrus-cli had a mode of running a task directly in the environment it's invoked in. That obviously won't be 100% faithful to the way tasks are normally executed, but it would still be very useful.

It's possible that that's already somehow possible, but I could not figure out how.

Regards,

Andres

[fkorotkov]

Hey @anarazel,

It will be a bit hacky but you can specify a persistent_worker instance instead whatever you use right now:

task:
  persistent_worker:
  script: touch test.txt

In this case cirrus run --dirty will just shell out things.

In general, I think we can add an option to override instance types from command lines.

[anarazel]

It will be a bit hacky but you can specify a persistent_worker instance instead whatever you use right now:

Nice, that mostly does work.

One thing I noticed while playing with that is that cirrus run doesn't seem to deal with env: CIRRUS_WORKING_DIR: ... in the task? Is that expected? I'd have expected that cirrus run would copy the working directory there...

In general, I think we can add an option to override instance types from command lines.

That'd be very useful. An alternative could be a flag to indicate that cirrus-cli is already in the target environment.