File Storage Observer, know where files are dumped during run

So I have read the Observing an experiment documentation up and down and the following isn’t clear to me:

If I want to run an experiment and keep track of just some basic information (e.g. the config and the acc) using the File Observer, how can I know where (what subdir) it is writing to?

I set the directory where I want all the experiments to be written to, but once I call an experiment, I do not know what the subdir will be (seems to be just enumerated…)

ex.observers.append(FileStorageObserver.create(experiment_dir))

Why would I want to know this?

Well returning the weights would results in them being dumped into results of the run file. This is not efficient and a poor idea.

The documentation for custom information suggests large data separately, and using add_artifact to save it to the DB.

I do not need two copies of the file.

So it would be nice if I could, via _run, access "observer_dump_loc" so I can write my files there:

os.path.join(_run["observer_dump_loc"], "all_this_data.npz")

# writes to /experiment_dir/<observer_dump_loc>/all_this_data.npz

[JarnoRFB]

Totally see your point here. A temporary directory per run sounds like a workable solution. I take it as a feature request! Maybe mkdtemp already does it. Meanwhile you can prefix all artifact files with _run._id and delete them right after you added them. This should keep the naming management to a minimum.

[SomeoneSerge]

Hi. What prevents us from allowing ndarray’s and streams as add_artifact arguments? That would’ve sure solved the naming issue as we wouldn’t have any names and also having to dump weights/etc into a file first isn’t very convenient protocol. If some underlying package only accepts filenames (mongo? I’m only making a guess) then perhaps sacred could bridge the gap and transparently to user make a temp. Also, sometimes a user of sacred may indeed need a temporary when some other package he uses only provides filename interface – so even with add_artifact supporting buffers it would be still handy to have a convenience function that makes a named temporary associated with the current run and returns the name.