For now I come to the conclusion, that keeping a 

requirements.txt

 and making clearml parse

Maybe we could just have that as another option?

Perfect, works! 🙂

However, because of the import carla it is added to the task requirements and clearml-agent tries to install it, although it is meant to be included at runtime.

One last question then I have everything solved: Is it possible to pass clearml the files to analyze manually? For example my setup consists of a run_this.py and this_should_be_run_A.py and this_should_be_run_B.py . I can then programmatically choose which file to import with importlib. Is there a way to tell clearml programmatically to analyze the files, so it can built up the requirements correctly?

howdy Tim, I have tried to stay out of this, because a lot is going over my head (I am not a smart man 🙂 but, one thing I wanted to ask, are you doing the swapping in and out of code to do a/b testing with your models ?! Is this the reason for doing this ? Because if so, I would be vastly more inclined to try and think of a good way to do that. Again, this maybe wrong, I am trying to understand the use case for swapping in and out code. 🙂

I can then programmatically choose which file to import with importlib. Is there a way to tell clearml programmatically to analyze the files, so it can built up the requirements correctly?

Sadly no 😞
It analyzes the running code, then if it decides it is not a self contained script it will analyze the entire repo ...

I just saw that 

Task.create

 takes

Task.create is Not Task.init. It is meant to allow you to create new Tasks (think Jobs) from your own code. A good example would be pipelines and automation where you want to create Tasks from a known codebase and send them for execution
BTW: any reason why you would not want to analyze the entire repo?

There is a git issue for selecting "pip freeze" / auto analyze, we could add "use requirements.txt"
wdyt?

Or alternatively I just saw that Task.create takes a requirements.txt as an argument. This would also be fine for me, however I am not sure whether I should use Task.create ?

I have an carla.egg file on my local machine and on the worker that I include with sys.path.append before I can do import carla . It is the same procedure on my local machine and on the clearml-agent worker.

But you can manually add them with Task.add_requirements, no?

In my opinion an ugly solution. I would have to keep track of which requirements are missing. Then I would rather just add all requirements manually.

Here is a nice hack for you:
Task.add_requirements( package_name='carla', package_version="> 0 ; python_version < '2.7' # this hack disables the pip install")This will essentially make sure the agent will skip the installation of the package, but at least you will know it is there.

AlertBlackbird30 Thanks for asking. Just take everything with I grain of salt I say, because I am also not sure whether I do machine learning the correct way 😄

I think you got the right idea. I actually do reinforcement learning (RL), so I have multiple RL-environments and RL-agents. However, while the code for the agents differs between the agents, the glue code is the same. So what I do is I call python run_experiment.py --agent http://myproject.agents.my _agent --environment http://myprojects.environments.my _environment or python run_experiment.py --agent myproject.agents.different_agent --environment myprojects.environments.also_different_env .

I am still trying to solve the add_requirements + importlib combo. If I use detect_with_freeze I can not use add_requirements and if I use automatic code analysis it will not find all packages because of importlib .
For now I come to the conclusion, that keeping a requirements.txt and making clearml parse the requirements from there should be the most robust solution. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to do this with Task.init .

I see... Let me check something

It seems like the naming Task.create a lot of confusion (we are always open to suggestions and improvements). ReassuredTiger98 from your suggestion, it sounds like you would actually like more control in Task.init (let's leave Task.create aside, as its main function is Not to log the current running code, but to create an auxiliary Task).
Did I understand you correctly ?

Thanks a lot. To summarize: To me clearml is a framework, but I would rather have it be a library.
Other than that I am very happy with clearml and it is probably my favorite machine learning related package of the last two years! 🙂 And thanks for taking so much time to talk to me!

Obviously in my examples there is a lot of stuff missing. I just want to show, that the user should be able to replicate Task.init easily so it can be configured in every way, but still can make use of the magic that clearml has, for stuff that does not differ from the comfort way.

AgitatedDove14 Yes, you understood correctly. But Task.create is used by Task.init something like this, right?
` def init(project_name, task_name):
if not Task.exists_already(project_name, task_name):
task = Task.create(...)
else:
task = load_existing_task()

return task `

if I use automatic code analysis it will not find all packages because of 

importlib

.

But you can manually add them with Task.add_requirements, no?

Isn't that risky? not knowing you need a package ?
How do you actually install it on the remote machine with the agent ?

I think such an option can work, but actually if I had free wishes I would say that the clearml.Task code would need some refactoring (but I am not an experienced software engineer, so I could be totally wrong). It is not clear, what and how Task.init does what it does and the very long method declaration is confusing. I think there should be two ways to initialize tasks:
Specify a lot manually, e.g. task = Task.create() task.add_requirements(from_requirements_files(..)) task.add_entrypoint(...) ...2. A comfort way just like it is now, but that internally looks like this:
def init(project_name, task_name): #only necessary stuff task = Task.create() task.add_requirements(use_clearml_conf_method(..)) task.add_entrypoint(auto_determine_entrypoint) ....

Yes, the mechanisms under the hood are quite complex, the automagic does not come for "free" 🙂
Anyhow, your perspective is understood. And as you mentioned I think your use case might be a bit less common. Nonetheless we will try to come-up with a solution (probably an argument for Task.init so you could specify a few more options for the auto package detection)

Never a problem Tim.. although it does prompt me to try and figure out a/b model testing myself ... I see everything as a "potential blog post" 😄 😄

🙂 Tell me when you find a good way!

Stupid question Tim (and I understand that maybe your code is under NDA etc but) can you show the python code that you need to a/b against ?

I have a strange theory, that if the code is in classes, then you could include both in one .py file and then ENV["use_model"]="a" or ENV["use_model"]="b" to select between them .. in that way, you would clone the experiment and change the config and re-run

but of course, this is all largely dependent on your code and structure etc

My code is in classes, indeed. But I have more than one model. Actually, all the things that people store in for example yaml or json configs I store in python files. And I do not want to statically import all the models/configs.

Btw: I think Task.init is more confusing than Task.create and I would rather rename the former.

But 

Task.create

 is used by 

Task.init

Surprisingly , no 🙂