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How to write your own plugin

You can extend TensorBoard to show custom visualizations and connect to custom backends by writing a custom plugin. Clone and tinker with one of the examples, or learn about the plugin system by following the ADDING_A_PLUGIN guide. Custom plugins can be published on PyPI to be shared with the community.

Developing a custom plugin does not require Bazel or building TensorBoard.

How to Develop TensorBoard

TensorBoard at HEAD relies on the nightly installation of TensorFlow: this allows plugin authors to use the latest features of TensorFlow, but it means release versions of TensorFlow may not suffice for development. We recommend installing TensorFlow nightly in a Python virtualenv, and then running your modified development copy of TensorBoard within that virtualenv. To install TensorFlow nightly within the virtualenv, as well as TensorBoard's runtime and tooling dependencies, you can run:

$ virtualenv -p python3 tf
$ source tf/bin/activate
(tf)$ pip install --upgrade pip
(tf)$ pip install tf-nightly -r tensorboard/pip_package/requirements.txt -r tensorboard/pip_package/requirements_dev.txt
(tf)$ pip uninstall -y tb-nightly

TensorBoard builds are done with Bazel, so you may need to install Bazel. The Bazel build will automatically "vulcanize" all the HTML files and generate a "binary" launcher script. When HTML is vulcanized, it means all the script tags and HTML imports are inlined into one big HTML file. Then the Bazel build puts that index.html file inside a static assets zip. The python HTTP server then reads static assets from that zip while serving.

You can build and run TensorBoard via Bazel (from within the TensorFlow nightly virtualenv) as follows:

(tf)$ bazel run //tensorboard -- --logdir /path/to/logs

For any changes to the frontend, you’ll need to install Yarn to lint your code (yarn lint, yarn fix-lint). You’ll also need Yarn to add or remove any NPM dependencies.

For any changes to the backend, you’ll need to install Black to lint your code (run black .). Our black version is specified in requirements_dev.txt in this repository. Black only runs on Python 3.6 or higher, so you may want to install it into a separate virtual environment and use a wrapper script to invoke it from any environment.

You may wish to configure your editor to automatically run Prettier and Black on save.

To generate fake log data for a plugin, run its demo script. For instance, this command generates fake scalar data in /tmp/scalars_demo:

(tf)$ bazel run //tensorboard/plugins/scalar:scalars_demo

If you have Bazel≥0.16 and want to build any commit of TensorBoard prior to 2018-08-07, then you must first cherry-pick pull request #1334 onto your working tree:

$ git cherry-pick bc4e7a6e5517daf918433a8f5983fc6bd239358f

Pro tips

You may find the following optional tips useful for development.

Ignoring large cleanup commits in git blame

git config blame.ignoreRevsFile .git-blame-ignore-revs  # requires Git >= 2.23

We maintain a list of commits with large diffs that are known to not have any semantic effect, like mass code reformattings. As of Git 2.23, you can configure Git to ignore these commits in the output of git blame, so that lines are blamed to the most recent “real” change. Set the blame.ignoreRevsFile Git config option to .git-blame-ignore-revs to enable this by default, or pass --ignore-revs-file .git-blame-ignore-revs to enable it for a single command. When enabled by default, this also works with editor plugins like vim-fugitive. See git help blame and git help config for more details.

iBazel and dev target

To make the devleopment faster, we can use run TensorBoard on dev target with iBazel.

(tf)$ ibazel run tensorboard:dev -- \
--logdir path/to/logs \
[--bind_all] \
[--port PORT_NUMBER]
  • ibazel: Bazel is capable of performing incremental builds where it builds only the subset of files that are impacted by file changes. However, it does not come with a file watcher. For an improved developer experience, start TensorBoard with ibazel instead of bazel which will automatically re-build and start the server when files change.
  • :dev: A target to bundle all dev assets with no vulcanization, which makes the build faster.
  • --bind_all: Used to view the running TensorBoard over the network than from localhost, necessary when running at a remote machine and accessing the server from your local chrome browser.

Access your server at http://<YOUR_SERVER_ADDRESS>:<PORT_NUMBER>/ if you are running TensorBoard at a remote machine. Otherwise localhost:<PORT_NUMBER> should work.

If you do not have the ibazel binary on your system, you can use the command below.

# Optionally run `yarn` to keep `node_modules` up-to-date.
yarn run ibazel run tensorboard:dev -- -- --logdir path/to/logs

Development Using Docker

Rather than spend the time setting up a development environment, you may find it easier to run the project using Docker.

Build the image using the following command from the root directory. docker build -t tensorflow/tensorboard .

The image will only need to be rebuilt when a new dependency is added or an existing dependency is updated.

Once the image is successfully built you can easily start up a development environment with the following command

docker run \
    -p 6006:6006 \
    -v $PWD/tensorboard:/tensorboard/tensorboard \
    -v $MY_LOG_DIR:/logdir \
    tensorflow/tensorboard \
    ibazel run tensorboard:dev -- --logdir /logdir --bind_all

TensorBoard will now be accessible at localhost:6006

For continued development you may want to either save the compiled project with another volume mount or else plan to reuse the same container to prevent having to repeatedly clean compile the project.

Note that it may still be necessary to run tensorboard natively in order to test compatibility with other platforms (i.e. OSX)

Debugging Polymer UI Tests Locally

Our UI tests (e.g., //tensorboard/components/vz_sorting/test) for our polymer code base use HTML import which is now deprecated from all browsers (Chrome 79- had the native support)and is run without any polyfills. In order to debug tests, you may want to run a a Chromium used by our CI that supports HTML import. It can be found in ./bazel-bin/third_party/chromium/chromium.out (exact path to binary will differ by OS you are on; for Linux, the full path is ./bazel-bin/third_party/chromium/chromium.out/chrome-linux/chrome).

For example of the vz_sorting test,

# Run the debug instance of the test. It should run a web server at a dynamic
# port.
bazel run tensorboard/components/vz_sorting/test:test_web_library

# In another tab:

# Fetch, if missing, the Chromium
bazel build third_party/chromium
./bazel-bin/third_party/chromium/chromium.out/chrome-linux/chrome

# Lastly, put the address returnd by the web server into the Chromium.

Debugging Angular UI Tests Locally

Here is a short summary of the various commands and their primary function. Please see below for more details. We recommand using ibazel test for regular work and bazel run for deep dive debugging.

  • bazel test/run: runs tests once and done.
  • ibazel test: supports file watching.
  • ibazel run: provides karma console breakpoint debugging; does not support file watching.
  • Both ibazel test and ibazel run supports console.log and fit/fdescribe, which are used to narrow down the test amount.

  1. Just run all webapp tests. The job stops after finished. console.log is not supported. Not handy on debugging.

    (tf)$ bazel test //tensorboard/webapp/...

  2. Using ibazel to auto detect the file changes and use target karma_test_chromium-local for running on webapp tests.

    (tf)$ ibazel test //tensorboard/webapp/... --test_output=all
    • --test_output=all: for displaying number of tests if using 'fit'.

  3. To run on a specific test, we can change the target (with chromium-local suffix). For example,

    //  Run webapp tests on `karma_test` target
(tf)$ ibazel test //tensorboard/webapp:karma_test_chromium-local

//  Run notification center tests on `notification_center_test` target
(tf)$ ibazel test //tensorboard/webapp/notification_center:notification_center_test_chromium-local

  4. For running a karma console to set break points for debugging purpose, use bazel run. Access the karma console at port 9876 (For example, http://<YOUR_SERVER_ADDRESS>:9876/) and click 'DEBUG' button, it pops up another page, where you have to use browser developer console for better debugging.

    (tf)$ bazel run //tensorboard/webapp:karma_test_chromium-local

    However, you cannot use ibazel run in this case. The file watcher is glitchy on running the tests when detecting changes. It shows 'a broken pipe' in terminal. We need to terminate and restart the program manually.

Adding, Updating, or Removing Frontend Dependencies

For the most part, frontend-specific third-party dependencies are hosted by npm and managed by yarn.

The source of truth for yarn is a combination of the package.json and yarn.lock files. package.json is maintained by us developers and describes direct dependencies while yarn.lock is maintained by the system and describes the entire tree of transitive dependencies. In reality both files are often edited automatically by calls to yarn and package.json only sometimes needs to be edited by hand.

  1. Install yarn.

  2. Add or modify an entry in the [dependencies] or [devDependencies] section of package.json. You can do this manually but often it's preferred to use yarn from the command line:

  3. Run yarn run yarn-deduplicate.

  4. Rebuild and test TensorBoard to make sure it works:

    • rm -rf node_modules; bazel clean --expunge; yarn
    • bazel run tensorboard -- --logdir <your favorite logdir>
    • bazel test --test_output=errors tensorboard/webapp/... tensorboard/components/... tensorboard/plugins/...

Updating rules_nodejs

The bazel rules we use for compiling, bundling, testing, and running our frontend code come from rules_nodejs.

When upgrading rules_nodejs we generally must also consider upgrading:

  • The npm packages scoped with @bazel
  • The rules_sass bazel library
  • The bazel version

Sample upgrade: #5977

  1. Determine which version of rules_nodejs to upgrade to and find its release notes in https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_nodejs/releases. Read the upgrade instructions for that release and every other release since our previous upgrade. Typically these instructions follow the same pattern but there are occasionally special instructions, especially for major releases. Make a mental note of any of these special instructions.

  2. Update the build_bazel_rules_nodejs target in the WORKSPACE file as described in the rules_nodejs release notes. Also remove or comment out the now-stale links to "http://mirror.tensorflow.org/".

  3. Update npm packages scoped with @bazel in package.json using yarn.

    • Use the same version as the rules_nodejs version.
    • See the previous section for instructions on how to use yarn.

  4. Update the rules_sass target in the WORKSPACE file.

  5. Update the minimum bazel version to match the one supported by rules_nodejs:

  6. Attempt to rebuild and test TensorBoard to make sure it works:

    • rm -rf node_modules; bazel clean --expunge; yarn
    • bazel run tensorboard --logdir <your favorite logdir>
    • bazel test --test_output=errors tensorboard/webapp/... tensorboard/components/... tensorboard/plugins/...

  7. The first attempt to rebuild and test TensorBoard rarely works. Investigate the problems and fix them. At this point, some of the special instructions in the rules_nodejs release notes (from Step 1) might be helpful.

  8. Generate mirrors for the new versions of rules_nodejs and rules_sass and update the WORKSPACE file with the new "http://mirror.tensorflow.org/" URLs. Googlers, see information at go/tensorboard-tf-mirror.

Updating Angular

Angular is the UI framework we use for most new UI functionality. A new major version of Angular is released every 6 months and, so, we try to upgrade our Angular dependency at least twice a year.

Helpful documents, especially for determining correct versions of dependencies:

When upgrading Angular we generally must consider upgrading the following dependencies listed in package.json. They should be upgraded using yarn upgrade as described in this section.

  • All @angular/* and @angular-devkit/* dependencies.
    • Except @angular/build-tooling, for which we currently don't have any upgrade policy/guidance. It is acceptable to leave this alone unless you discover a need to upgrade it.
    • Most of these should be upgraded to the ~same version. The easiest is to upgrade to the latest version for each subdependency (within the major series being upgraded to).
  • typescript
    • The Angular and Ngrx upgrade documents will explain which version is expected.
  • All @ngrx/* dependencies.
    • Ngrx should be on the same major version as Angular.
  • rxjs
    • The Ngrx upgrade documentation will explain which version of rxjs to upgrade to.
  • zone.js
    • This is generally not well documented. You can attempt to upgrade to the latest version but sometimes you have to guess at the most recent version that is compatible with the version of Angular.
  • ngx-color-picker
    • Similarly, the latest version might be fine but you also might have to guess at the most recent version that is compatible with the version fo Angular.

Sample upgrades:

The builds and tests are unlikely to work on the first try and you will have to investigate and fix breakages due to changes in behavior.