Example MLFlow Projects

This repository is part of the MLOps Coursera Course with practical examples to apply different MLFlow techniques for understanding the components of MLFlow better.

Create an MLFlow Project

Find more about what it takes to create an MLFlow project with Conda, a packaging solution that can work with Python as well as other system dependencies.

For this project, we'll use a small CSV file with data about wines, called wine-ratings.csv.

Step 1: Start with the dependencies

Before going into the details of the project, you probably have a good idea of what you need to install. I recommend setting up a Conda environment first. Even if you prefer using pip for installing dependencies, you can still define that with a Conda environment.

This early in the project's lifecycle you are probably not ready to do some training, so let's only concentrate in exploratory work for the dataset.

conda create --name exploratory python=3.8

Once the environment is created, activate it so that packages are installed in that activated environment.

conda activate exploratory

Next, with the exploratory environment activated export the dependencies so a new YAML file named conda_env.yml

conda env export --name exploratory > conda_env.yml

You should end up with a file similar to this:

name: exploratory
channels:
  - conda-forge
dependencies:
  - bzip2=1.0.8
  - ca-certificates
  - libffi=3.4.2
  - libsqlite=3.39.3
  - libzlib=1.2.12
  - ncurses=6.3
  - openssl=3.0.5
  - python=3.8.13
  - readline=8.1.2
  - setuptools=65.3.0
  - sqlite=3.39.3
  - tk=8.6.12
  - wheel=0.37.1
  - xz=5.2.6
  - pip

Next, append a few lines to use pip to install mlflow and pandas. This is not a hard requirement, but it is useful to know that you can use the conda environment file to add more dependencies using pip and not conda. The newly appended lines should look like this:

  - pip:
    - pandas==1.5.0
    - mlflow==1.29.0

The full file should look exactly like exploratory/conda_env.yml

Since you added the pip installs directly to the file, you didn't really install them, so go ahead and run the following command to ensure everything is working:

 conda env update --file conda_env.yml --prune

The command will look into any new (or different) dependencies and install them. The --prune flag will remove anything that is no longer defined in the conda_env.yml file. In this case, you didn't remove anything, but it is still a good idea to keep using it.