buro 0.0.13

Experiment tracker and lab journal made for humans — and sexy human-agent interaction for AI research

buro

An experiment tracker and lab journal made for humans — and for sexy human ⇄ agent interaction in AI research. Log your runs, metrics, and media to a Buro server.

Install

pip install buro

Quickstart

import buro

run = buro.init(project="my-project")        # or "team-slug/my-project"
for step in range(100):
    buro.log({"loss": 1.0 / (step + 1), "acc": step / 100}, step=step)
buro.finish()

init(project=...) resolves the project against the server and auto-creates it if it doesn't exist. project is a slug ref: "slug" (personal) or "team-slug/slug" (team).

Authenticate

Log in once on your machine:

buro login --api-url https://<your-buro-server>
buro whoami

The SDK resolves credentials in this order:

1. buro.setup(api_key=..., api_url=...) in code
2. BURO_API_KEY / BURO_API_URL environment variables
3. ~/.buro/credentials (written by buro login)

On a cluster or in CI, the env-var path is usually easiest:

export BURO_API_KEY=buro_key_...
export BURO_API_URL=https://<your-buro-server>

Log media

buro.log({"sample": buro.Image("path/to/image.png")})   # numpy array or PIL image also work
# also available: buro.Audio, buro.Video

Code tracking

Every run automatically snapshots the source code that actually ran, so the compare view can show exactly what changed between two runs — not just which hyperparameters differed.

It works by tracing, not scanning: buro watches the Python modules your run imports and keeps the ones that are your code — everything outside the standard library, your installed packages, and buro itself. Each file is recorded under its import path (models/encoder.py, not an absolute path on your machine), hashed, and uploaded once — identical files are shared across runs, so a hyperparameter sweep that doesn't touch the code uploads nothing new.

Because it follows the imports rather than walking a directory, the snapshot is:

• exactly your run's code — the entry script plus the modules it imported, across packages; never a stray sweep of your whole repo, a sibling project, or config/secret files that happen to sit nearby;
• the same on every machine — a file is identified by how it's imported, so the same code on your laptop and on a cluster diffs as unchanged;
• best-effort — snapshotting never slows down or crashes your run.

Config files (config.yaml, lockfiles, …) are not captured — their values already live in your run config (buro.init(config=...)). For an unusual layout, or to pin exactly what's captured, set BURO_CODE_ROOT=/path/to/project.

What gets captured

The snapshot is Python source only: your entry script plus the imported user modules that resolve to a .py/.pyi file — recorded by import path, hashed, and deduplicated.

These are not captured:

• Compiled extension modules — .so / .pyd / .dylib (Cython, pybind11, and CUDA extensions, plus JIT-compiled artifacts such as Triton's cuda_utils). Build output, not source.
• Python bytecode — .pyc without source.
• Any file detected as binary — a NUL byte in its first bytes.
• Third-party / standard-library packages — already excluded by the user-code filter.
• Non-imported files — configs, lockfiles, data, and native source (.cu / .cpp) that isn't itself an imported module; the snapshot follows sys.modules, not a directory walk.

The identity of compiled and third-party code lives in the environment capture instead (pip freeze, CUDA / driver, GPU, host metadata). When modules are skipped, buro logs one line naming them — visible in your console and the run's Logs.

System metrics

Every run also logs host system metrics in the background — no setup needed: CPU utilization (system-wide, plus system/cpu.busiest for the single hottest core), RAM, disk and network throughput in MB/s, and — on NVIDIA hosts — per-GPU utilization, memory, temperature, and power.

To stay light on storage, buro samples often but logs rarely: it reads the counters every ~2s and writes one windowed summary every ~30s (mean for gauges, peak for the busiest core, rate for I/O). Tune or turn it off:

buro.setup(
    system_emit_sec=30,           # how often a summary point is written (default 30s)
    system_sample_sec=2,          # how often counters are sampled underneath (default 2s)
    system_metrics_enabled=True,  # set False to disable system metrics entirely
)

Reading your data (agents + analysis)

Everything you log is queryable back — from Python and the shell — built for agent-driven research and quick analysis.

from buro import query

qc = query.connect(api_key="buro_key_...", base_url="https://<your-buro-server>")

run = qc.run("a1b2c3d4")               # 8-hex short id (from the UI or `buro runs`)
run.scalars()                          # -> the run's metric names

s = run.scalar("val/loss").fetch()     # a faithful series + authoritative stats
s.stats.min                            # exact whole-series min: {step, value}
s.points[-1]                           # the real logged points, with timestamps

run.scalar("val/loss").range(9000, 10000).downsample(200).fetch()   # zoom a window
qc.summaries(["a1b2c3d4", "e5f6a7b8"], names=["val/loss"]).rows()    # compare runs

fetch() returns both the curve (.points — real logged points, real timestamps) and authoritative .stats (min/max/first/last as {step, value}, plus count/mean) computed over the whole requested range. Read exact extrema from .stats — never by reducing the (possibly downsampled) points. .range(a, b) and .downsample(n) keep .stats scoped to the window.

The same surface is a CLI, JSON-friendly for scripts and agents:

buro runs team-slug/my-project                            # list runs + short ids
buro scalars series a1b2c3d4 --name val/loss --json
buro scalars summary --runs a1b2c3d4,e5f6a7b8 --names val/loss --json

Docs

• wandb API compatibility: docs/wandb-compatibility.md
• Release/publishing process: docs/publishing.md