Registering Stacks

Registering stacks, components, and flavors.

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Registering Stacks, Components, and Flavors

You can combine various MLOps tools into a ZenML stack as follows:

1. Register a stack component to configure each tool using zenml <STACK_COMPONENT> register.

2. Register a stack to bring a particular combination of stack components together using zenml stack register.

3. Register a stack flavor to add a new tool to the ZenML flavor registry, if the tool you are looking for is not supported out-of-the-box, or if you want to modify standard behavior of standard flavors.

In this guide, we will learn about the first two, while the last is a slightly advanced topic covered later.

Registering Stack Components

First, you need to create a new instance of the respective stack component with the desired flavor using zenml <STACK_COMPONENT> register <NAME> --flavor=<FLAVOR>. Most flavors require further parameters that you can pass as additional arguments --param=value, similar to how we passed the flavor.

E.g., to register a local artifact store, we could use the following command:

zenml artifact-store register <ARTIFACT_STORE_NAME> \
    --flavor=local \
    --path=/path/to/your/store

In case you do not know all the available parameters, you can also use the interactive mode to register stack components. This will then walk you through each parameter (to skip just press ENTER):

zenml artifact-store register <ARTIFACT_STORE_NAME> \
    --flavor=local -i

Or you could simply describe the flavor to give a list of configuration available:

zenml artifact-store flavor describe local

After registering, you should be able to see the new artifact store in the list of registered artifact stores, which you can access using the following command:

zenml artifact-store list

Or you can register on the dashboard directly:

Orchestrator list

Registering stack components

Our CLI features a wide variety of commands that let you manage and use your stack components and flavors. If you would like to learn more, please run zenml <STACK_COMPONENT> --help or visit our CLI docs.

Registering a Stack

After registering each tool as the respective stack components, you can combine all of them into one stack using the zenml stack register command:

zenml stack register <STACK_NAME> \
    --orchestrator <ORCHESTRATOR_NAME> \
    --artifact-store <ARTIFACT_STORE_NAME> \
    ...

You can use zenml stack register --help to see a list of all possible arguments to the zenml stack register command, including a list of which option to use for which stack component.

Alternatively, you can see and register stacks on the dashboard as well:

Stack list

Registering stack

Activating a Stack

Finally, to start using the stack you just registered, set it as active:

zenml stack set <STACK_NAME>

Now all your code is automatically executed using this stack.

Changing Stacks

If you have multiple stacks configured, you can switch between them using the zenml stack set command, similar to how you activate a stack.

Accessing the Active Stack in Python

The following code snippet shows how you can retrieve or modify information of your active stack and stack components in Python:

from zenml.client import Client

client = Client()
active_stack = client.active_stack
print(active_stack.name)
print(active_stack.orchestrator.name)
print(active_stack.artifact_store.name)
print(active_stack.artifact_store.path)

Unregistering Stacks

To unregister (delete) a stack and all of its components, run

zenml stack delete <STACK_NAME>

to delete the stack itself, followed by

zenml <STACK_COMPONENT> delete <STACK_COMPONENT_NAME>

to delete each of the individual stack components.

If you provisioned infrastructure related to the stack, make sure to deprovision it using zenml stack down --force before unregistering the stack. See the Managing Stack States section for more details.