ml-project-cookiecutter

A cookiecutter template for my private ML projects.

Motivation

During my career I worked in a lot of different ML projects - computer vision, NLP, classical ML, time series forecasting and others. The projects ranged from pure R&D, through PoCs and production ready stuff. Whenever I would start a new project I found myself copying things from a bunch of different sources and my old projects again and again - recreating and duplicating the work I did a dozen times before. Cookiecutter project templates to the rescue!

The usage of technologies and certain patterns in the template is highly opinionated and is dictated by years of experience of working with Data Scientists and R&D Engineers. As ML Engineer I would often find myself working with low quality code, written by others in notebooks or scripts, without any form of documentation, standardized coding style or even a way to reproduce the environment or analysis results. Moving that to production? Good luck!

In my opinion the fastest way to move ML stuff to production is to force the Data Scientists to write quality code from the start. Want to add your changes to the repo? Sure, once all pre-commit hooks are green you'll be able to commit your changes. Add to that a CI pipeline, automated tests and PR review process, and you'll have easier way to ensure that the code and models are production ready faster.

Won't that slow down Data Scientists? Yes. At first at least. They'll have to learn working with a set of standard python tools that are known in the industry for years. Spending a few hours on this is way better than spending a few weeks on productionizing the code later. Your ML/MLOps Engineers will thank you for this.

Important

Now, standardized code style, type hints and good documentation are just a small step to success. All of this doesn't mean much without code understanding and following good coding practices. In my opinion every great Data Scientist or ML Engineer should also be a great programmer. Learn how to write clean, testable code. Learn data structures, algorithms and design patterns. Have a CI in place. Verify changes via PRs and automated tests. Automate as much as you can. Integrate with other services that will allow you to ensure reproducibility, scaling, experiment tracing, artifact versioning and easier deployment.

This project was greatly inspired by Cookiecutter Data Science project.

Features

• Integrated pre-commit hooks:
  • pyupgrade
  • codespell
  • docformatter
  • ruff
  • mypy
  • pytest
  • And a few more...
• Project documentation creation using MkDocs with Material theme.
• CI pipelines (Azure DevOps)
• Some useful utility classes and functions I found myself re-implementing again and again
• Folder structure inspired by Cookiecutter Data Science
• Conda env.yaml file for reproducibility
• Makefile with a bunch of pre-defined commands
• Secrets support using .env files and pydantic-settings
• pyproject.toml with project tool configs

Getting started

Run:

cookiecutter https://github.com/xultaeculcis/ml-project-cookiecutter

cd into your new project directory and then run:

make init-project

to get started.

For full guide, please check out this page.

Contributing

Please refer to this guide.

Running tests

To run the unit tests execute:

pytest tests