Julia Artifacts for Dummies

A clever system to make images, binaries, trainings sets and other data available in your package which matches your architecture.

Okay I admit it, when I read the Julia Artifacts documentation, I was very confused about a lot of things. If you are one of the smart ones, who could figure it out, then congratulations, you don’t need to read further.

The rest of us need a bit more intro and context to what Artifacts are about and a more detailed walkthrough of the API and usage. That is what I hope to provide here. I will also cover my initial misconceptions in the hope that you might have had the same ones and I could clarify some of them to you.

Before we get started, let me give a quick hint of what we are talking about. Artifacts in Julia exists in the form of a module inside the Pkg module called Pkg.Artifacts. You access the functionality in the REPL through:

julia> using Pkg.Artifacts

It offers functions such as artifact_toml, artifact_path and artifact_exists. We will look more at those later.

Combined with this, artifacts also adds another file to your source code repo:

Foobar
├── Artifacts.toml        # Stores info about artifacts
├── Manifest.toml…