Directories

There are a number of directories that Maelstrom clients use. This chapter documents them.

Project Directory

The project directory is used to resolve local paths, as are used in various layers. It’s also where the client will put the container tags lock file.

For maelstrom-pytest and maelstrom-run, the project directory is just the current working directory.

For cargo-maelstrom, the Maelstrom project directory is the same as the Cargo project directory. This is where the top-level Cargo.toml file is for the project. For simple Cargo projects with a single package, this will be the package’s root directory. For more complex Cargo projects that use workspaces, this will be the workspace root directory.

For maelstrom-go-test, the Maelstrom project directory is root of main package. This is where the closest go.mod file is.

Container Depot Directory

The container depot directory is where clients cache container images that they download from image registries. It’s usually desirable to share this directory across all clients and all projects. It’s specified by the container-image-depot-root configuration value. See here for details.

Cache Directory

The cache directory concept comes from the XDG Base Directory Specification. It’s where non-essential files that are easily rebuilt are stored.

Maelstrom clients use this directory for their local worker. The size of the local-worker part of the cache is maintained by the cache-size configuration value.

In addition, clients use this directory to store other cached data like layers created with layer specifications. This size of this part of the cache directory isn’t actively managed. If it grows too large, the user can safely delete the directory.

This cache is project- and client-specific, so it is stored within the project in a client-specific directory: