How to start a task environment

Vivaria has a set of tools for creating task environments without running agents on them. This is useful for developing tasks and for getting humans to perform QA runs and human baselines on tasks.

There are one or two ways to create task environments, depending on if your Vivaria instance has Git support set up or not.

Both ways use the viv task start command. Run viv task start --help to see a full list of flags. Run viv task --help to see a full list of commands for interacting with task environments.

Push your task to a Git remote

This only works if your Vivaria instance has Git support.

cd path/to/my-tasks-repo
viv task start general/count-odds

Vivaria will commit and push any uncommitted changes in my-tasks-repo from your computer to your Git hosting service. Then, it'll look up the task code for general/count-odds in your Vivaria instance's tasks Git repo and start a task environment based on that task code.

Upload your task directly to Vivaria

This works whether or not your Vivaria instance has Git support.

viv task start general/count-odds --task-family-path path/to/general

Vivaria will create a zip file containing the task code in the folder path/to/general. It'll upload the zip file to Vivaria, which will start a task environment based on the task code.