dag

Visualize the pipeline(s) in dvc.yaml as one or more graph(s) of connected stages.

Synopsis

usage: dvc dag [-h] [-q | -v] [--dot] [--full] [target]

positional arguments:
  target          Stage or output to show pipeline for (optional)
                  Uses all stages in the workspace by default.

Description

A data pipeline, in general, is a series of data processing stages (for example, console commands that take an input and produce an output). A pipeline may produce intermediate data, and has a final result.

Data science and machine learning pipelines typically start with large raw datasets, include intermediate featurization and training stages, and produce a final model, as well as accuracy metrics.

In DVC, pipeline stages and commands, their data I/O, interdependencies, and results (intermediate or final) are specified in dvc.yaml, which can be written manually or built using the helper command dvc run. This allows DVC to restore one or more pipelines later (see dvc repro).

DVC builds a dependency graph (DAG) to do this.

dvc dag command displays the stages of a pipeline up to the target stage. If target is omitted, it will show the full project DAG.

Options

• --full - show full DAG that the target stage belongs to, instead of showing only its ancestors.
• --dot - show DAG in DOT format. It can be passed to third party visualization utilities.
• -h, --help - prints the usage/help message, and exit.
• -q, --quiet - do not write anything to standard output. Exit with 0 if no problems arise, otherwise 1.
• -v, --verbose - displays detailed tracing information.

Paging the output

This command's output is automatically piped to Less, if available in the terminal. (The exact command used is less --chop-long-lines --clear-screen.) If less is not available (e.g. on Windows), the output is simply printed out.

It's also possible to enable Less paging on Windows.

Providing a custom pager

It's possible to override the default pager via the DVC_PAGER environment variable. For example, the following command will replace the default pager with more, for a single run:

$ DVC_PAGER=more dvc dag

For a persistent change, define DVC_PAGER in the shell configuration. For example in Bash, we could add the following line to ~/.bashrc:

export DVC_PAGER=more

Example: Visualize a DVC Pipeline

Visualize the prepare, featurize, train, and evaluate stages of a pipeline as defined in dvc.yaml:

$ dvc dag
         +---------+
         | prepare |
         +---------+
              *
              *
              *
        +-----------+
        | featurize |
        +-----------+
         **        **
       **            *
      *               **
+-------+               *
| train |             **
+-------+            *
         **        **
           **    **
             *  *
        +----------+
        | evaluate |
        +----------+