No check for logdir path

Version:

TensorBoard 2.1.0

Issue:

TensorBoard doesn’t check if logdir exists or not. Not a huge issue, but a bit weird that there is no error message if I provide a non-existing directory. If one mistakenly provides a faulty path, they will probably only notice it when opening the link in the browser, after which they have to close the tab, go back, kill the process and restart it. It would be nice to have a warning at least.

Suggestion

Start Tensorboard as usual, but warn the user if logdir does not exist (yet).

[wchargin]

Yep, that’s why we’ve historically not done this, and in fact considered it a blocker for designs that would rely on this, such as better diagnostics for accidental misuse of --logdir_spec.

For instance, in Colab/Jupyter, one runs %tensorboard --logdir ... prior to starting the model training, because while the model is training you can’t execute any other Colab cells, but if you’ve already started TensorBoard then it will continue to live-update.

[bileschi]

There could be some avenue for improving the usability. Perhaps a flag or config to allow users to specify the desired behavior. What designs wouldn’t interrupt current behavior but would make lives easier?