create-ml-app

create-ml-app makes it easier to spin up a machine learning project locally in Python and handle various package dependencies. The name is inspired by create-react-app.

This project abstracts away pip installs and virtual environment commands from the user. To use, simply fork this repository and execute make run from your shell. The main.py file in this repo has an example ML script (training a neural network on MNIST in PyTorch).

Motivation

When starting a new ML project or prototyping a model locally, it can be tedious to:

• handle all the Python package dependencies
• create/activate/deactivate your virtual environment
• parameterize arguments
• remember to define a random seed

Having a Makefile can simplify the virtual environment overhead and centralize parameters in one place. This repository is an example of how to use a Makefile in a simple ML project (training a neural network on MNIST in PyTorch).

Background

Under the hood, this project uses venv to create a virtual environment and install Python packages. The primary commands supported by this Makefile are:

• make lint: This will show errors as flagged by pylint.
• make run: This will download any new packages found in setup.py and run main.py with user-specified variables. You may need to modify the Makefile to include variables of your choice and change the run definition to run your Python file with your specified variables.

If you want to use any Python package in your project, simply add the package name to setup.py and it will get installed the next time you execute make run from your shell.

Usage

git clone https://github.com/shreyashankar/create-ml-app.git my-ml-app
cd my-ml-app
make run