Is it necessary to commit DVC files from our CI pipelines?

Question

DVC uses git commits to save the experiments and navigate between experiments.

Is it possible to avoid making auto-commits in CI/CD (to save data artifacts after dvc repro in CI/CD side).

Answer 1

will you make it part of CI pipeline

DVC often serves as a part of MLOps infrastructure. There is a popular blog post about CI/CD for ML where DVC is used under the hood. Another example but with GitLab CI/CD.

scenario where you will integrate dvc commit command with CI pipelines?

If you mean git commit of DVC files (not dvc commit) then yes, you need to commit dvc-files into Git during CI/CD process. Auto-commit is not the best practice.

How to avoid Git commit in CI/CD:

1. After ML model training in CI/CD, save changed dvc-files in external storage (for example GitLab artifact/releases), then get the files to a developer machine and commit there. Users usually write scripts to automate it.
2. Wait for DVC 1.0 release when run-cache (like build-cache) will be implemented. Run-cache makes dvc-files ephemeral and no additional Git commits will be required. Technically, run-cache is an associative storage repo state --> run results outside of Git repo (in data remote).

Disclaimer: I'm one of the creators of DVC.