Checkout Evaluation Order

spaces has two ways of checking out a workspace:

• spaces checkout-repo: uses git clone to checkout out a repo and evaulates the spaces modules it contains. This is the recommended way for most use cases.
• spaces checkout (workflow): uses workflows scripts as the input files.

Checkout Evaluation Order

During checkout, spaces evaluates all modules in a precise order.

• Checkout-Repo: spaces evaluates the modules in lexicographical order, depth first.
• Checkout (workflow): spaces evaluates the modules in the order they are provided on the command line. Each module is evaluated in depth-first order, meaning that any repos checked out by a module are evaluated before moving on to the next module from the command line.

spaces only looks for checkout rules in the root directory of the repo.

The load() function never has any files available to it while the first module is evaluated. The job of the first module is to use the built-in checkout.add_repo() to add the spaces starlark SDK, or a suitable alternative, to the workspace.

After the first module is evaluated, load() can find useful modules to load.

Checkout-Repo Example Evaluation Order

spaces checkout-repo --url=https://github.com/my-org/my-repo ...

And my-repo has:

• 0.checkout.spaces.star: this is evaluated first. If it uses checkout.add_repo() the repos will be checked out and evaluated before moving to the next module in my-repo.
• 1.checkout.spaces.star: this is evaluated after 0.checkout.spaces.star and any repos checked out by 0.checkout.spaces.star.
• spaces.star: this is evaluated next.

Checkout (Workflow) Example

spaces checkout --script=workflows/sdk.spaces.star --script=workflows/my-repo.spaces.star ...

The local file located at workflows/sdk.spaces.star is evaluated first. Then any repos checked out by workflows/sdk.spaces.star are evaluated, followed by workflows/my-repo.spaces.star, plus any repos checked out by workflows/my-repo.spaces.star.