django-split-settings VS hydra

Large settings.py file! Even close to 1 mg volume! This error often misleads you and other developers who are reading your code. Try not to make your settings.py file too large. Delete the comments first, then try using the split_settings tool to separate the project settings.

I'm using https://github.com/sobolevn/django-split-settings

Nice tool, only unfortunate name, consider changing it. Already very well know security tool named hydra https://github.com/vanhauser-thc/thc-hydra been around since 2001. Then facebook went ahead and named their config tool hydra https://github.com/facebookresearch/hydra on top of it. Like we get it, hydra popular mythology but we could use more original naming for tools

This looks really impressive, and I'm excited to see how it performs on our data!

P.S., I think the name conflicts with Hydra, the configuration management library: https://hydra.cc/

I've been trying to learn PyTorch Lightning and Hydra in order to use/create my own custom deep learning template (e.g. like this) as it would greatly help with my research workflow. A lot of the work I do requires me to analyse metrics based on the logits/activations of the model.

However, hydra seems to have several limitations that are really annoying and are making me reconsider my choice. Most problematic is the inability to group parameters together in a multirun. Hydra only supports trying all combinations of parameters, as described in https://github.com/facebookresearch/hydra/issues/1258, which does not seem to be a priority for hydra. Furthermore, hydras optuna optimizer implementation does not allow for early pruning of bad runs, which while not a deal breaker is definitely a nice to have feature.

Do you hate the fact that they don't let you return the config file: https://github.com/facebookresearch/hydra/issues/407

I kind of built this due to frustrations with Hydra. Hydra is an end to end framework, it locks you into a certain DL project format, it decides logging, model saving and a whole host of things. For example Hydra can do the same config file overwriting that I allow but you have to store the config file with the name config.yaml inside a specific folder. On top of that hydra doesn’t let you return the config file from the main function so you have to put all the major logic in the main function itself (link), the authors claim this is by design. I can find Hydra useful for a mature less experimental project. But in my robotics and ML research, I like being able to write code where I want and integrating it how I want, especially when debugging for which I think this package is useful. TLDR; If you just want the config file functionality use my package, if you want a complete DL project manager use Hydra. While hydra implements this config file functionality, it also adds a lot of restrictions to project structure that you might not like.

For managing configs of ML experiments (where each experiment can override a base config, and "variant" configs can further override the experiment config, etc), Hydra + Yaml + OmegaConf is really nice.

https://hydra.cc/

I admit I don't fully understand all the advanced options in Hydra, but the basic usage is already very useful. A nice guide is here:

https://florianwilhelm.info/2022/01/configuration_via_yaml_a...