How to use time builtin in Cirrus Starlark

[nbyavuz]

Hi,

I found that we can use couple of Starlark builtins in Cirrus, for example:

load("cirrus", "fs")

Is there a way to use time builtin in Cirrus or should I create a feature request for that?

Thanks!

[fkorotkov]

What is your use case for time?

Philosophy behind Starlark is to eliminate side effect and make the execution of the scripts reproducible based on inputs. That's why there is no random and time. Even an iteration over a set is deterministic. Right now the only side effect you can bring to the scripts is via http module which we added for calling external APIs mostly.

[nbyavuz]

I want to add current time to environment variables, so I can use same time variable from all tasks. Something like:

load("cirrus", "env", "time")

def main():
    additional_env = {}

    additional_env['TIME_NOW'] = time.now().unix

    return [
      ('env', additional_env),
    ]

[fkorotkov]

What if we add CIRRUS_CHANGE_TIMESTAMP environment variable instead to expose timestamp of the Git commit?