Package an entire Kedro project

This section explains how to build project documentation, and how to bundle a Kedro project into a Python package.

Kedro also has an advanced feature which supports packaging on a pipeline level allowing you share and reuse pipelines across projects! To read more about this please look at the section on micro-packaging.

Add documentation to a Kedro project

There are several documentation frameworks for Python projects. This section describes how to use Sphinx.

To install Sphinx, run the following:

pip install sphinx

Set up the Sphinx project files

Warning

Currently, Kedro projects are created with a docs/source subdirectory, which gets pre-populated with two Sphinx configuration files (conf.py, and index.rst), needed by the kedro build-docs command. This command is deprecated; it will be removed in Kedro version 0.19, along with those dummy files.

Before proceeding with these instructions, back up the contents of docs/source/index.rst and remove both docs/source/conf.py and docs/source/index.rst.

First, run the following command:

sphinx-quickstart docs

Sphinx will ask a series of configuration questions. The first is as follows:

You have two options for placing the build directory for Sphinx output.
Either, you use a directory "_build" within the root path,
or you separate "source" and "build" directories within the root path.

> Separate source and build directories (y/n)? [n]:

Select y to separate the build files from the source files, and enter any additional information that Sphinx requests such as the project name and the documentation language, which defaults to English.

Build HTML documentation

Warning

If you previously backed up the contents of index.rst, restore them before proceeding.

After the quickstart process is complete, you can build the documentation by navigating to the docs directory and running the following:

make html

Project documentation will be written to the docs/build/html directory.

You may want to add project-specific Markdown documentation within the docs/source folder of your Kedro project. To be able to build it, follow the introduction instructions of MyST-Parser and update the docs/source/index.rst file to add the markdown files to the table of contents.

Documentation from docstrings

If you wish to add documentation built from docstrings within your project, you need to make some changes to the Sphinx configuration files found in the docs/source directory to use automatic documentation generation from code.

In conf.py, add the following to ensure that the sphinx.ext.autodoc and sphinx.ext.autosummary extensions are specified, and autosummary_generate is enabled:

extensions = ["sphinx.ext.autodoc", "sphinx.ext.autosummary"]
autosummary_generate = True

Finally, to ensure that you include the autodoc modules in the build, run the following command once from the docs folder:

sphinx-apidoc --module-first -o source ../src/<package_name>

This will generate a docs/src/modules.rst file, as well as other files containing references to any docstrings. To include those in your documentation, make sure docs/src/index.rst has a modules entry in the table of contents:

.. toctree::

   modules

From the docs folder run the following:

pip install -e ../src

Finally, from the docs folder, run this command to build a full set of documentation that automatically includes docstrings:

make html

Note

Consult the Sphinx project documentation for additional options to pass to sphinx-build. To customise your documentation beyond the basic template, you’ll need to adjust the Sphinx configuration settings which are stored in docs/source/conf.py file.

Package a Kedro project

To package a project, run the following in your project root directory:

kedro package

Kedro builds the package into the dist folder of the project as a .whl file, which is a Python packaging format for binary distribution.

The resulting .whl packages only contain the Python source code of the Kedro pipeline, not any of the conf and data subfolders. This means that you can distribute the project to run elsewhere, such as on a separate computer with different configuration information, dataset and logging locations.

The project configuration is provided separately in a tar.gz file, also inside the dist folder. This compressed version of the config files excludes any files inside the local directory.

Run a packaged project

To run a packaged project it must first be installed. To install the package from a .whl file, you need to have Python and pip installed on your machine, but you do not need to have Kedro installed.

To install the project, run the following command:

pip install <path-to-wheel-file>

Note

Once the packaged project is installed, you will need to add:

  • a conf folder

  • a data folder if the pipeline loads/saves local data

Alternatively, you can make use of the OmegaConfigLoader to run the configuration directly from the compressed .tar.gz configuration file by running kedro run –conf-source .tar.gz

Once your project is installed, it can be run either from the command line or interactively using Python code.

To do a basic run of your installed project from the command line, run python -m <package_name>. The packaged project also exposes a command line interface which you can use to modify how your project will be run. To see a list of options, use python -m <package_name> --help at the command line.

To run your packaged project interactively using code, you can import main from the project:

from <package_name>.__main__ import main

main(
    ["--pipeline", "__default__"]
)  # or simply main() if you don't want to provide any arguments

This is equivalent to python -m <package_name> at the command line, and you can pass in all the arguments that correspond to the options described by python -m <package_name> --help.

Docker, Airflow and other deployment targets

There are various methods to deploy packaged pipelines via Kedro plugins: