robovast-client

Talk to a running RoboVAST service — upload a project, launch a campaign, wait for it, fetch the results — without installing RoboVAST.

pip install robovast-client
vast login https://robovast.example.org

What it is for

RoboVAST runs simulation campaigns: a scenario, a sweep of configurations, repeated runs, recorded provenance. That work happens on the service, on a Docker host or a Kubernetes cluster. If you are the person driving it rather than the person hosting it, this is all you need.

The full robovast distribution pulls in a simulator stack, an array library and a dataframe library — 88 packages, around 290 MB — because it can execute campaigns itself. This one is three dependencies (pydantic, click, requests) and about 30 MB, because it only talks to something that can.

Not yet on PyPI. Install it from a checkout with pip install src/robovast_client.

What you get

vast grows commands as capability is installed; with only the client, it is:

vast cluster and vast service are partly here on purpose: a subcommand exists exactly when something that can perform it is installed. The verbs above only drive a service, so they are complete here. vast cluster setup/cleanup/jobs-cleanup/monitor and vast service upgrade/token need a kubeconfig and come with robovast-cluster. So vast cluster --help lists store-cleanup and not setup — nothing is stubbed and nothing fails on use.

Both groups spanning two distributions is the design: a group is named after the object it acts on, not after what you installed.

There is no ambient project. Every command names its own input, and a campaign runs a workspace's project — vast workspace run <workspace> [vast].

An LLM agent reaches the same service through its MCP endpoint, which needs nothing installed at all. vast login prints the claude mcp add line that registers it. The control verbs are deliberately on both sides; each side additionally owns what only it can do — bulk bytes and long waits here, results queries and diff-based authoring there.

Waiting for a campaign

A campaign can run for days, so nothing blocks a request on one. vast campaign wait polls the service and exits when the campaign is genuinely finished — past postprocessing, not merely past its last run:

vast campaign wait basic-nav-2026-08-16-101500

Its exit code is the answer: 0 finished, 1 failed, 2 you interrupted the wait, and a distinct code for "no such campaign" so a typo cannot be mistaken for a failed run. Run it as the whole command — chaining anything after it makes the shell report the wrapper's status instead, which turns a failed campaign into a reported success.

What it is not

No simulator, no Kubernetes client, no Docker, no MuJoCo, no ROS. It cannot execute a campaign or build an image itself, only ask a service to. If you need to run campaigns on your own machine, install robovast; to host them on a cluster, add robovast-cluster.

Licence

Apache-2.0.