Allow users to explicitly pass config files from the command-line.

🚀 Feature Request

A user should be able to explicitly pass a config file to use as a command-line argument.

Motivation

Hard-coded paths makes scripts using hydra brittle and confusing (a là the “what’s my CWD?” game). A user should be able to pass a config explicitly.

Pitch

Describe the solution you’d like A config_file command-line flag could be added which, when provided, is the config to be used.

Describe alternatives you’ve considered

• No command-line flag is added. A user must always ensure the hard-coded config file exists where expected.
• A default config is provided and shipped with hydra-enabled applications and overridden manually.

Are you willing to open a pull request? (See CONTRIBUTING) Probably. 😃

[aosokin]

Hi, is this still alive? I think that in machine learning applications using external config files is very handy. Say I have my training method with the default config for everything. Then, I’m doing multiple rounds of experiments. For each round, I want to define many config parameters identically but vary just one. It is very inconvenient to set up a whole bunch of non-default hyper-parameters in many launching scripts. I’d prefer to have one external (partial) config file with non-default parameters for each round and to define only the varying parameters through command line.

[omry]

Still alive in #386. I am going to comment there with a clean workaround for many of the use cases.