The ActiveState Artifact Repository

An ActiveState Artifact Repository (AAR) is a software storage system that acts as a source for the code artifacts required by your software teams and systems. It may contain third-party source code components imported from a public repository, as well as the packages built from those components.

At this time the ActiveState Artifact Repository is only available to Enterprise tier members.

Important features of your AAR are:

  • Offering a secure source of packages for your developers that conforms to security and compliance expectations.
  • Standardizes development artifacts to eliminate “works on my machine” issues.
  • Ensures provenance, in which each built artifact can be fully traced back to its original components.

Create and Manage an AAR

Create an AAR

The initial build process for your first AAR must be started by ActiveState. Contact Us for more info.

After you have contacted ActiveState to begin the AAR generation process, do the following:

  1. Go to your project
  2. Open Project Settings tab
  3. On the left side, click “ActiveState Artifactory Repository”
  4. Click “Add ActiveState Artifact Repository”
  5. Create a name for your AAR
  6. Your URL has been generated. The AAR will be available to use once the build status is “complete.”

Projects that build an AAR will have significantly longer build times.

Edit an AAR

AARs do not update automatically when the project is edited. To update an AAR while maintaining the same URL:

  1. Go to your project
  2. Open the History tab
  3. Find the commit you want to use to build the new AAR and copy the Commit ID
  4. Open the Project Settings tab
  5. On the left side, click “ActiveState Artifactory Repository”
  6. Under Commit ID click “Edit”
  7. Paste in the Commit ID and click save
  8. Your AAR has been updated and can be accessed from the same URL

Delete an AAR

  1. In your Project Settings tab, click ActiveState Artifact Repository and find the AAR you want to delete under the Existing Servers section.
  2. Click the trash bin icon and in the “Are you sure you want to delete this tag?” prompt click Delete.

Install a Package Using Your AAR

Go to the project Open Project Settings tab On the left side, click “ActiveState Artifactory Repository” Copy the URL

Configure AAR URL Globally

To configure pip to use the AAR for all package installations on your machine, set the repository URL globally. Once configured, pip commands will automatically use this repository without requiring additional flags.

  1. Create or edit your pip.ini file and add a global index-url variable.

    File location on Windows

    %HOMEPATH%\pip\pip.ini

    File location on Linux/macOS

    ~/.pip/pip.conf

  2. Add the following:

    [global]
index-url = https://aar.activestate.com/<org-name>/<project-name>/latest

Once configured, packages can be installed normally via:

pip3 install <package-name>

Install a Single Package From AAR

If you do not wish to configure the AAR to be used globally, you can install packages with the following command:

pip install --index-url https://aar.activestate.com/<org-name>/<project-name>/latest <package-name>