chore: 🚢 release v1.9.0 (#612)

This PR contains the generated changelog for the release v1.9.0.

⚠️ **Merging this PR will immediately trigger a new release**. ⚠️

To specify additional release notes, please edit this comment after the
following line.

---

## Highlights

### Environment variables in `tesseract_config.yaml`

You can now set environment variables directly in
`tesseract_config.yaml` via a new `env:` section, without resorting to
`custom_build_steps`:

```yaml
env:
  XLA_PYTHON_CLIENT_PREALLOCATE: "false"
  OMP_NUM_THREADS: "4"
```

These values are baked into the Docker image at build time. You can
still override them at runtime with `tesseract serve --env` or
`tesseract run --env`. (#591)

### Timeout parameter for the Python API

`Tesseract.from_image()` and `Tesseract.from_url()` now accept an
optional `timeout` parameter to guard against hanging HTTP requests
(e.g. when a container runs out of memory):

```python
with Tesseract.from_image("my_tesseract", timeout=30) as t:
    ...

# or use a (connect, read) tuple for finer control
t = Tesseract.from_url("http://host:8000", timeout=(5, 300))
```

The default remains no timeout, so existing code is unaffected. (#597)

### `Tesseract.container_info()`

A new `container_info()` method on the `Tesseract` class exposes the
underlying Docker container object during a serve session. This is
useful for resource monitoring, executing commands inside the container,
or retrieving container logs outside of the SDK:

```python
with Tesseract.from_image("my_tesseract") as t:
    container = t.container_info()
    print(container.id, container.name, container.host_port)
```

(#601)

## Other changes

- `tesseract serve` now supports a `--skip-health-check` flag (also
available as `skip_health_check` in `Tesseract.from_image()`). Use this
for Tesseracts with slow startup, e.g. due to JIT compilation or large
model loading. The caller is responsible for polling `/health` manually.
(#596)
- Foreign array-like objects such as PyTorch tensors can now be passed
directly to the Python API without manual conversion. (#587)
- Docker builds no longer fail when the base image sets a non-root
default user. (#598)
- IO schemas now include explicit field declaration order in their
metadata (`field_order`), allowing downstream clients to restore the
correct order even after round-tripping through systems that scramble
JSON keys. (#595)
- `click` is now an explicit dependency, fixing potential import errors
with newer versions of `typer`. (#610)

---------

Co-authored-by: Dion Häfner <dion.haefner@simulation.science>

Author: PasteurBot

CHANGELOG.md

@@ -2,6 +2,31 @@
 
 All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file.
 
+## [1.9.0] - 2026-05-27
+
+### Features
+
+- Add `env:` section to `tesseract_config.yaml` to allow setting environment variables in built Tesseracts (#591)
+- Add `timeout` parameter to Python API functions (#597)
+- Add `tesseract serve --skip-health-check` argument (#596)
+- Add `Tesseract.container_info` to expose information about running containers in Python API (#601)
+- Explicitly export IO schema field order (#595)
+
+### Bug Fixes
+
+- Better support for foreign arrays (like torch tensors) in Python API (#587)
+- Always become root at the start of docker builds (#598)
+- Add `click` to base install dependencies (#610)
+
+### Documentation
+
+- Add new landing page for Tesseract ecosystem (#562)
+- Add Tesseract Blog (#549)
+
+### Testing
+
+- Rewrite stale-keepalive retry test without real socket dependence (#611)
+
 ## [1.8.2] - 2026-05-06
 
 ### Bug Fixes