Featureform Python Client

Overview

Featureform’s Python client is a SDK for defining, managing and serving resources (e.g. infrastructure providers, data sources, transformations, etc.). At a high level, the API is divided into two parts:

• Registration: register data stores (e.g. PostgreSQL), data sources (e.g. tables or CSV files) as resources or get and/or list previously registered resources
• Serving: retrieve training sets and features for offline training or online inference

Requirements

• Python 3.7-3.10 (Untested with version 3.11)

Setting Up Your Local Development Environment

Step 1: Install gRPC and Protocol Buffer Tooling

See grpc.io for instructions on installing the protocol buffer compiler for your OS and language-specific plugins for Golang (NOTE: the Golang dependencies can also be installed via Homebrew.)

Step 2: Create Python Virtual Environment

You may create a Python virtual environment however you prefer, but the directory name .venv is ignored by Git for convenience, so you may choose to create your virtual environment in the root of the project.

> python -m venv .venv && . .venv/bin/activate
(.venv) >

Step 3: Upgrade pip and Install Build Dependencies

The following dependencies are required to build the client:

• build
• pytest
• python-dotenv
• pytest-mock

(.venv) > python -m pip install --upgrade pip
(.venv) > python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Step 4: Compile API Protocol Buffers and Python Stub

The shell script gen_grpc.sh has been provided for convenience. Change the file access permissions to make it executable and run it:

(.venv) > chmod +x gen_grpc.sh
(.venv) > ./gen_grpc.sh

Step 5: Build Python Client and Dashboard

The shell script pip_update.sh has been provided for convenience. Change the file access permissions to make it executable and run it:

(.venv) > chmod +x pip_update.sh
(.venv) > ./pip_update.sh

Step 6: Optionally Run Client Test Suite

To ensure your changes haven’t broken the client, run the test suite with the following make target:

(.venv) > make pytest

Outcome

With steps 1-5 successfully completed, you should have the featureform CLI command accessible in your terminal session.

(.venv) > featureform -h

To further verify that your setup is complete and correct, you may optionally walk through the Quickstart tutorial. You may put the definitions.py file at the root of the project, which won’t be ignored by Git, or use a URL to a file (e.g. hosted on GitHub).