Below are some commonly asked questions by ActiveState users. If you have additional questions, please check the online community forums. They are regularly maintained by ActiveState staff and are contributed to by other members of the ActiveState community. For questions related to your account, contact us here.
Each runtime is created and executed in a virtual environment that will avoid conflicts between other projects, production environments, and the developer environments of other developers (if the runtime has been shared). Using the ActiveState Platform, each runtime can be easily updated to include the most current and secure versions of all dependencies/packages/binaries/etc.
Instead of offering a pre-packaged downloadable installer, the State Tool creates a virtual environment on your system allowing you to run concurrent and disparate development environments that contain all (and only) the packages you need for your projects, without conflicts or interfering with the preexisting language versions on your system.
Installers are available for Enterprise tier users. Click here to find out more
Each ActiveState project (and the associated runtime) is installed in its own virtual directory to prevent dependency conflicts. When you activate a runtime you’re setting up a virtual environment to work from. This keeps your dependencies separate from those outside of the virtual environment’s parameters. This is important because
After exiting your runtime, files are cached on your local system until deletion. This helps keep reloading time fast. Regularly using the state pull command will keep your project, and its virtual environment, up to date on your local installation.
You can end your activated state by typing exit into the command prompt or terminal window. Closing the command prompt or terminal window will also deactivate your project.
You can find instructions for location-specific installations in the checkout documentation here.
ActiveState currently has integrations with several popular IDEs including Visual Studio Code, Pycharm, and Eclipse. More information about integrations can be found here.
For organizations with Service Level Agreements (SLA), use the contact information included in your SLA to request specific packages. When requesting a new package, include the name of your organization and project, as well as the package and, when possible, the package version.
Users without an SLA can post a request on the community forums. Feel free to include as much information as you feel comfortable disclosing, including your organization or project name, and package version. These requests will be processed according to their availability and user demand.
Organizations with SLAs are encouraged to use the contact information provided in their agreement to receive assistance from ActiveState. Users without an active SLA can try to review and edit any CVEs that may be causing the build to fail, or ask for help on the community forums.
After making changes to your project using the Platform, open the project using the State Tool by starting a shell or activating the project. Then run state pull. This will update your project with the changes made on the Platform.
If you experience trouble installing your runtime, make sure that the OS version on your local machine meets the minimum standards.
The recommended version of each language is based on Platform build success rates and the availability of new open source package versions. ActiveState continuously updates these recommended versions as more recent versions of the language ecosystem become stable and vetted by the open source community.
To work with more than one project on your system, check out each project to different directories and then deploy them separately from each directory by running state shell <orgname>/<projectname>. Each shell environment is temporary, and once the working session has ended (either by typing exit into the terminal or closing the application) it will need to be re-deployed each time you work on your project.
We recommend not editing your PATH variable and instead, using the state checkout <orgname/projectname> and state use <orgname/projectname> (to set your runtime as your default installation) or state shell <orgname/projectname> (to open a secure shell in which to use your runtime) commands to interact with your Perl installation.
If you still choose to edit your PATH variable, adding your project at the \exec folder (not the \site or \bin folder) will direct your machine to the correct directory needed for your project. This will only let you add a single Perl project as your system default, as your machine will always select the first Perl addition from the top of the list and continue using that version for all projects.
Note that for Perl 5.28 and earlier, you will need to add your project at the \bin folder.
While traditionally .exe files are executables responsible for installing and running applications on your machine, the perl.exe file located in your project control folder may be different.
Some of the perl.exe files in your projects act as wrappers set up around the original perl.exe file that set up PATH and search variables to point to the correct version of the executable file that matches what is needed for your project. This is why pointing the PATH variable to the /exec folder of your project is important to ensure your projects work as intended.
A validation error with the following text may be shown when attempting to produce an installer or Docker image for your project.
" Validation error: Selected language uses an old build system that cannot produce an installer or Docker image. Please select a newer language version or remove the selected platform deployment option.”
A validation error occurs between the build request from the user and the current build architecture of the Platform. To increase the likelihood of a successful build, select a more recent language version for your project or change the OS settings of the project (i.e. only selecting “Linux” for a Docker image). Attempt the build again with these changes in effect. If the problem persists, please contact us.