Dev environments

Before submitting a long-running task or deploying a model, you may want to experiment interactively using your IDE, terminal, or Jupyter notebooks.

With dstack, you can provision a dev environment with the required cloud resources, code, and environment via a single command.

Define a configuration

First, create a YAML file in your project folder. Its name must end with .dstack.yml (e.g. .dstack.yml or dev.dstack.yml are both acceptable).

type: dev-environment

python: "3.11" # (Optional) If not specified, your local version is used

ide: vscode

Configuration options

You can specify your own Docker image, configure environment variables, etc. If no image is specified, dstack uses its own Docker image (pre-configured with Python, Conda, and essential CUDA drivers). For more details, refer to the Reference.

Run the configuration

To run a configuration, use the dstack run command followed by the working directory path, configuration file path, and any other options (e.g., for requesting hardware resources).

$ dstack run . -f .dstack.yml --gpu A100

 BACKEND     REGION         RESOURCES                     SPOT  PRICE
 tensordock  unitedkingdom  10xCPU, 80GB, 1xA100 (80GB)   no    $1.595
 azure       westus3        24xCPU, 220GB, 1xA100 (80GB)  no    $3.673
 azure       westus2        24xCPU, 220GB, 1xA100 (80GB)  no    $3.673

Continue? [y/n]: y

Provisioning...
---> 100%

To open in VS Code Desktop, use this link:
  vscode://vscode-remote/ssh-remote+fast-moth-1/workflow

Run options

The dstack run command allows you to use --gpu to request GPUs (e.g. --gpu A100 or --gpu 80GB or --gpu A100:4, etc.), and many other options (incl. spot instances, max price, max duration, retry policy, etc.). For more details, refer to the Reference.

Once the dev environment is provisioned, click the link to open the environment in your desktop IDE.

Port forwarding

When running a dev environment, dstack forwards the remote ports to localhost for secure and convenient access.

No need to worry about copying code, setting up environment, IDE, etc. dstack handles it all automatically.

.gitignore

When running a dev environment, dstack uses the exact version of code from your project directory.

If there are large files, consider creating a .gitignore file to exclude them for better performance.