Training locally with ML Engine & GCloud

Question

I would like to train my model locally using this command:

gcloud ml-engine local train
  --module-name cloud_runner
  --job-dir ./tmp/output

The issue is that it complains that --job-dir: Must be of form gs://bucket/object.

This is a local train so I'm wondering why it wants the output to be a gs storage bucket rather than a local directory.

Answer 1

As explained by other gcloud --job-dir expects the location to be in GCS. To go around that you can pass it as a folder directly to your module.

gcloud ml-engine local train \
    --package-path trainer \
    --module-name trainer.task \
    -- \
    --train-files $TRAIN_FILE \
    --eval-files $EVAL_FILE \
    --job-dir $JOB_DIR \
    --train-steps $TRAIN_STEPS