Visualise pipelines

Kedro-Viz displays data and machine-learning pipelines in an informative way, emphasising the connections between datasets and nodes. It shows the structure of your Kedro pipeline. This exercise assumes that you have been following the Spaceflights tutorial.

Install Kedro-Viz

You can install Kedro-Viz by running:

pip install kedro-viz

Visualise a whole pipeline

You should be in your project root directory, and once Kedro-Viz is installed you can visualise your pipeline by running:

kedro viz

This command will run a server on http://127.0.0.1:4141 that will open up your visualisation on a browser. You should be able to see the following:

../_images/pipeline_visualisation.png

You may also use the --autoreload flag to autoreload Kedro Viz when a Python or YAML file has changed in the corresponding Kedro project.

../_images/pipeline_viz_autoreload.gif

If a visualisation panel opens up and a pipeline is not visible then please check that your pipeline definition is complete. All other errors can be logged as GitHub Issues on the Kedro-Viz repository.

Exit an open visualisation

You exit this visualisation by closing the open browser and entering Ctrl+C or Cmd+C in your terminal.

Visualise layers

A pipeline can be broken up into different layers according to how data is processed, and using a convention for layers makes it easier to collaborate. For example, the data engineering convention shown here labels datasets according to the stage of the pipeline (e.g. whether the data has been cleaned).

Kedro-Viz makes it easy to visualise these data processing stages by adding a layer attribute to the datasets in the Data Catalog. We will be modifying catalog.yml with the following:

companies:
  type: pandas.CSVDataSet
  filepath: data/01_raw/companies.csv
  layer: raw

reviews:
  type: pandas.CSVDataSet
  filepath: data/01_raw/reviews.csv
  layer: raw

shuttles:
  type: pandas.ExcelDataSet
  filepath: data/01_raw/shuttles.xlsx
  layer: raw

preprocessed_companies:
  type: pandas.CSVDataSet
  filepath: data/02_intermediate/preprocessed_companies.csv
  layer: intermediate

preprocessed_shuttles:
  type: pandas.CSVDataSet
  filepath: data/02_intermediate/preprocessed_shuttles.csv
  layer: intermediate

model_input_table:
  type: pandas.CSVDataSet
  filepath: data/03_primary/model_input_table.csv
  layer: primary

regressor:
  type: pickle.PickleDataSet
  filepath: data/06_models/regressor.pickle
  versioned: true
  layer: models

Run kedro-viz again with kedro viz and observe how your visualisation has changed to indicate the layers:

../_images/pipeline_visualisation_with_layers.png

Share a pipeline

Visualisations from Kedro-Viz are made shareable by using functionality that allows you to save the visualisation as a JSON file.

To save a visualisation, run:

kedro viz --save-file my_shareable_pipeline.json

This command will save a pipeline visualisation of your primary __default__ pipeline as a JSON file called my_shareable_pipeline.json.

To visualise a saved pipeline, run:

kedro viz --load-file my_shareable_pipeline.json

And this will visualise the pipeline visualisation saved as my_shareable_pipeline.json.