Settings

Settings are determined by command line argument, parameters, by environment variables, or by YAML files placed in ~/.pctasks.

Profiles

A “profile” tells PCTasks which settings file to use. You can set the profile by setting the PCTASKS_PROFILE environment variable, or by using pctasks profile set ${PROFILE}.

Profiles allow you to easily switch the environment PCTasks is targeting.

A profile is expected to have a YAML file in the settings folder with the name of the profile. For example, if for the profile staging, PCTasks would use the file ~/.pctasks/staging.yaml for settings.

Creating profiles

You can create a new profile for the client settings using pctasks. Run:

> pctasks profile create ${PROFILE}

to create a new profile named ${PROFILE}. Follow the prompts that ask for the API endpoint (e.g. https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/api/tasks/v1), your API key, and whether or not to ask for confirmation before submitting to the endpoint.

Editing profiles

You can edit a profile by using pctasks profile edit ${PROFILE}, which will take you through the same prompts and default to the values that currently exist in the profile.

Client Settings

PCTask users will need to specify client settings for usage. A settings file created by the above commands looks like this:

client:
  endpoint: https://planetarycomputer-staging.microsoft.com/api/tasks/v1
  api_key: XXXXXX
  confirmation_required: true
  default_args:
    registry: pccomponents.azurecr.io

The endpoint is the PCTasks API endpoint, and the API Key is the API Management token that is used to authenticate against the API.

If confirmation_required is true, PCTasks will ask for confirmation before submitting workflows to the endpoint. This can provide a double-check to ensure the intended profile is being used.

default_args allows a profile to specify default arguments for workflows. This is useful for common arguments in workflows, such as the container registry that should be used to pull a task image. In the above example, the user would not have to specify the registry argument when using the profile with these settings as they will be supplied by the defaults. Note that an argument is specified on the command line, will take precedence over a settings default.