Is remote execution considered stable? It looks like the CLI flags mark it as alpha

I’d say it mostly depends on what provider you use. Pants implements the open source Remote Execution API, so there are several different servers you can hook up to, or implement your own (non-trivial). Pants is the client. For Pants’s own CI, we were using Google’s RBE service for three months and it was awesome having 20 worker, compared to Travis’s 2 core CPU. But Google shut that down last month :/ There are some things that will need polish for Pants’s client-side, though, to be really ergonomic, e.g.: * better support for having different config for remote vs. local (Bazel’s “toolchains”) * speculation, meaning you can try local and remote, and go with what’s fastest For Toolchain’s remote execution/caching services we plan to offer, we’re focusing first on remote caching, and then will followup with remote execution.

I would add that Pants does not really support running the client on a different execution environment than the remote execution environment. For example, macOS client and Linux remote execution environment is an open issue.

we're basically just looking to have the jobs execute on one of our physical servers

it should work for that use case. that is basically the narrow use case for which it does actually work currently.

nice, can you point me towards the software/docs to set that up?

I’ll have to write the Pants client docs for that. For server-side docs, depends on which server (Buildfarm, Buildbarn, Buildgrid) you want to choose.

cool, that's exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!

I suggest joining buildteamworld.slack.com

yesh, doesn't seem to be working

DM me your email and I’ll send an invite

I'm in 👍

and let me know if you have any questions about the differences between the servers. I’ve basically setup all three in building the prototype of toolchain’s server offering