Manage application versions

When developing and deploying a Taipy application, it is straightforward to manage Taipy entities (scenarios, tasks, data nodes, etc.) and keep them up-to-date when the configuration changes.

In the following, we will use a basic Taipy application example defined in main.py.

import taipy as tp
from taipy import Config


def example_algorithm(entry: str):
    # does nothing!
    return entry

if __name__ == "__main__":
    input_cfg = Config.configure_data_node("my_input", default_data="a_string")
    output_cfg = Config.configure_data_node("my_output")
    task_cfg = Config.configure_task("example_algorithm", example_algorithm, input_cfg, output_cfg)
    scenario_cfg = Config.configure_scenario("my_scenario", [task_cfg])

    tp.Orchestrator().run()
    tp.create_scenario(scenario_cfg)
    print(f"Number of scenarios: {len(tp.get_scenarios())}")

Basic knowledge of Git is required to follow this tutorial.

Set up the Taipy application as a Git repository

Your application directory must be initialized for Git. From the application directory run:

$ git init
...
Initialized empty Git repository in ~/your_taipy_application/.git/

We then need to create a .gitignore file to ignore the .data directory that contains Taipy entities: we don't want entities to be managed by Git. You can create the .gitignore file manually or by running the following command:

$ echo ".data" > .gitignore

Then we can commit the .gitignore file to Git:

$ git add .gitignore
$ git commit -m "Initialize .gitignore to ignore Taipy entities"

Now you're ready to manage your Taipy application with Git and Taipy version management.

Create a Taipy application version

By default, a Taipy application runs in development mode, which means entities from previous development run are deleted before running the application. To save the entities of a run, you can create a new experiment version of your application by running your Taipy application with the --experiment option to the taipy command. After running the application to make sure that it works, let's name the experiment version 1.0 and commit the version to Git.

$ taipy run main.py --experiment 1.0
$ git add main.py
$ git commit -m "Create experiment version 1.0"

Switching between versions

A commonly used Git workflow is to use git checkout to switch to a different branch and work on a new application version. Let's create a new Git branch called 1.1 and switch to it:

$ git checkout -b 1.1
Switched to a new branch '1.1'

After modifying the application code (to experiment with a new algorithm for example), we can run the application in experiment mode and name the experiment version 1.1 in the new branch. This run will create and use entities of version 1.1 only.

$ taipy run main.py --experiment 1.1

We then can commit the new version to Git.

$ git add .
$ git commit -m "create experiment version 1.1"

Similarly, we can create a new branch 1.2 and create a new application version in it:

$ git checkout -b 1.2
Switched to a new branch '1.2'
...
# modify the application code and run the application
...
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "create experiment version 1.2"

The entities of all three versions 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 are still stored in the .data directory. We can switch back to the version 1.1 of the application and run it again:

$ git checkout 1.1
$ taipy run main.py --experiment 1.1

Warning

You need to run provide the correct version number when running the application in experiment mode. Otherwise, the configuration maybe incompatible with the entities of the version you want to run and an error will be raised.