Environment Manager#

Note: This feature is currently only supported on UNIX/MacOS.

Environment manager is a utility that helps create an isolated environment to run the BentoML CLI. Dependencies are pulled from your defined bentofile.yaml and the environment is built upon request. This means by passing --env to supported CLI commands (such as bentoml serve), such commands will then be run in an sandbox environment that mimics the behaviour during production.

» bentoml serve --env conda iris_classifier:latest

This creates and isolated conda environment from the dependencies in the bento and runs bentoml serve from that environment.

Note

The current implementation will try to install the given dependencies before running the CLI command. Therefore, the environment startup will be a blocking call.

BentoML CLI Commands that support Environment Manager
Supported Environments

  • conda

Caching strategies#

Currently, there are two types of environments that are supported by the environment manager:

  1. Persistent environment: If the given target is a Bento, then the created environment will be stored locally to $BENTOML_HOME/env. Such an environment will then be cached and later used by subsequent invocations.

  2. Ephemeral environment: In cases where the given target is not a Bento (import path to bentoml.Service, project directory containing a valid bentofile.yaml), the environment will be created and cleanup up on demand.

Note

You can run rm -rf $BENTOML_HOME/env to clear the cache.