Can I use TensorBoard with Google Colab?

ociule picture ociule · Dec 14, 2017 · Viewed 49.7k times · Source

Is there any way to use TensorBoard when training a TensorFlow model on Google Colab?

Answer

Joppe Geluykens picture Joppe Geluykens · Jan 26, 2018

EDIT: You probably want to give the official %tensorboard magic a go, available from TensorFlow 1.13 onward.


Prior to the existence of the %tensorboard magic, the standard way to achieve this was to proxy network traffic to the Colab VM using ngrok. A Colab example can be found here.

These are the steps (the code snippets represent cells of type "code" in colab):

  1. Get TensorBoard running in the background.
    Inspired by this answer.

    LOG_DIR = '/tmp/log'
    get_ipython().system_raw(
        'tensorboard --logdir {} --host 0.0.0.0 --port 6006 &'
        .format(LOG_DIR)
    )
    
  2. Download and unzip ngrok.
    Replace the link passed to wget with the correct download link for your OS.

    ! wget https://bin.equinox.io/c/4VmDzA7iaHb/ngrok-stable-linux-amd64.zip
    ! unzip ngrok-stable-linux-amd64.zip
    
  3. Launch ngrok background process...

    get_ipython().system_raw('./ngrok http 6006 &')
    

    ...and retrieve public url. Source

    ! curl -s http://localhost:4040/api/tunnels | python3 -c \
        "import sys, json; print(json.load(sys.stdin)['tunnels'][0]['public_url'])"