Slack Notifications for FastAI

Get slack notifications for FastAI model training.

Demo: https://jvn.io/aakashns/2e505d1a5e7b49e18e7849da3280b9da

fastai_slack provides a simple callback to receive Slack notifcations while training FastAI models, with just one extra line of code.

fastai_slack sends notifications to your chosen Slack workspace & channel for the following events:

• Start of training
• Losses and metrics at the end of every epoch (or every few epochs)
• End of training
• Exceptions that occur during training (with stack trace)

Installation and Usage

See this Jupyter notebook for a detailed setup and usage example: https://jvn.io/aakashns/2e505d1a5e7b49e18e7849da3280b9da

1. Install the fastai_slack library using pip:

pip install fastai_slack

2. Generate a Slack incoming webhook URL, which will allow you to send notifications to a Slack channel of your choice. More details here: https://api.slack.com/incoming-webhooks

The webhook URL should be kept secret, so fastai_slack provides a helpful read_webhook_url method to safely input webhook URL within Jupyter.

from fastai_slack import read_webhook_url
webhook_url = read_webhook_url()

3. While calling the fit method to train the model, passing in a SlackCallback configured with:

name: project/job name which will be included in every notification webhook_url: The Slack incoming webhook URL (read from user input earlier) frequency: How often to send a notification (defaults to 1 i.e. every epoch)

Here's a complete example:

from fastai.vision import *
from fastai_slack import SlackCallback

# Create a learner
data = ImageDataBunch.from_folder(untar_data(URLs.MNIST),train='training', valid='testing')
learn = cnn_learner(data, models.resnet18, metrics=accuracy)

# Create a callback
slack_cb = SlackCallback('mnist', webhook_url, frequency=2)

# fit with callback
learn.fit(8, callbacks=[slack_cb])

Here's what the notifications look like:

Configuration

Instead of passing the webhook URL manually each time, you can also set a system wide environment variable with the name FASTAI_SLACK_WEBHOOK contaning the URL, and it will be read automatically by SlackCallback. For instance, on Mac/Linux, you might need to add the following like to your ~/.bashrc:

FASTAI_SLACK_WEBHOOK=https://hooks.slack.com/services/T00000/B0000/XXXXXXXXXXX
# Replace the URL above with your Slack incoming webhook URL

Contributing

fastai_slack is open source, and you can view the source code here: https://github.com/jvn-io/fastai_slack

Please use Github to report bugs, request/propose feature. Pull requests with bug fixes and PRs are most welcome!