Alpaca

Alpaca is a command line tool to test out oasis models on EC2 servers. For a list of all the commands that are available for Alpaca, simply typing the commmand alpaca will list all currently available options.

AWS Login

Alpaca uses boto3 to connect to AWS. To allow your AWS account to be accessed to create the instance, boto3 will require either you to have the environment variables AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY both set, or to have credentials in a .aws folder, which can be obtained with the command aws configure using the aws cli.

Config

To use Alpaca, first create an alpaca config. This can be easily done by the command alpaca create-config which will list all subcommands available (config varies by type). Examples of Alpaca config can be found in the example_configs folder, and the config creation tool will assist you in creating your own by providing help text and defaults for all given options.

To override config that is missing from your config file, you can set the environment variable ALPACA_{config} which will replace the config if it is missing from your config file. Please note that AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY are boto3 environment variables and not Alpaca ones and will not have the ALPACA_ prefix.

Running a model

When you have created your config file, to use it to perform an Oasis model run, simply use the command alpaca model <path-to-config> to watch your instance be spun up and your results saved either back to your computer or up in S3 depending on your configuration.

Running pytests

Simply use the command alpaca pytest <path-to-config> to do the same thing with any tests you have for a model.

Running on the platform

For the platform run, your repo must either have a docker compose file or a deployment bash script that will start your platform. When you have created your config, use the command alpaca api <path-to-config> to create a platform in EC2 and do an API run.

Notes

Alpaca is currently designed to be ran on instances using Ubuntu. This can be changed in the future, but only Ubuntu instances will currently work due to the path /home/ubuntu being used as a default.

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