Using sacred without the CLI?

I really love the idea of sacred, but I already have a CLI interface for my application, which I’m unwilling to change. Would it be possible to disentangle the guts of Experiment from the main-hijacking semantics?

[JarnoRFB]

I think what you can do is just define your experiment in a separate file. There you might just declare the function that runs your experiment as a command.

experiment.py

exp = Experiment()

@exp.command
def conduct():
    # do fancy experiment

Then in the file that contains the cli you can import the experiment object and update the config that you parsed with your cli parser. For example assuming that you get the number of epochs from your cli, it could look something like this

cli.py

from experiment import exp

epochs = parse_cli()
exp.run('conduct', config_updates={'epochs': epochs})

Then you can run this from the command line just as usual, e.g. python cli.py --epoch 5

You probably don’t even have to use a separate command. Using

exp = Experiment()

@exp.main
def run():
    # do fancy experiment

from experiment import exp

epochs = parse_cli()
exp.run(config_updates={'epochs': epochs})

should work equally well. Hope that helps!

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