When we started building TaskCluster about a year and a half ago one of the primary goals was to provide a self-serve experience, so people could experiment and automate things without waiting for someone else to deploy new configuration. Greg Arndt (:garndt) recently wrote a blog post demystifying in-tree TaskCluster scheduling. The in-tree configuration allows developers to write new CI tasks to run on TaskCluster, and test these new tasks on try before landing them like any other patch.

This way of developing test and build tasks by adding in-tree configuration in a patch is very powerful, and it allows anyone with try access to experiment with configuration for much of our CI pipeline in a self-serve manner. However, not all tools are best triggered from a post-commit-hook, instead it might be preferable to have direct API access when:

• Locating existing builds in our task index,
• Debugging for intermittent issues by running a specific task repeatedly, and
• Running tools for bisecting commits.

To facilitate tools like this TaskCluster offers a series of well-documented REST APIs that can be access with either permanent or temporary TaskCluster credentials. We also provide client libraries for Javascript (node/browser), Python, Go and Java. However, being that TaskCluster is a loosely coupled set of distributed components it is not always trivial to figure out how to piece together the different APIs and features. To make these things more approachable I’ve started a series of interactive tutorials:

• Tutorial 1: Modern asynchronous Javascript,
• Tutorial 2: Authentication against TaskCluster, and,
• Tutorial 3: Creating Your First Task

All these tutorials are interactive, featuring a runtime that will transpile your code with babel.js before running it in the browser. The runtime environment also exposes the require function from a browserify bundle containing some of my favorite npm modules, making the example editors a great place to test code snippets using taskcluster or related services.

Happy hacking, and feel free submit PRs for all my spelling errors at github.com/taskcluster/taskcluster-docs.