marco-dvcs 0.1.8

A minimal dataset versioning system for text data with a focus on reproducibility.

Marco Dataset Versioning System

A minimal dataset versioning system for text data with a strong focus on reproducibility and transparency. Treat your text datasets like code — immutable, versioned, reproducible, and explainable.

Marco acts as a lightweight Python library, meaning you can initialize it in any machine learning project folder to safely version and preprocess your datasets without altering your original files.

🚀 Installation (Linux / MacOS)

On modern Linux environments (like Arch Linux, Ubuntu 23.04+), Python packages must be installed in a Virtual Environment (PEP 668) to prevent conflicts with your system packages.

Follow these steps to safely install Marco into your ML project:

1. Clone this repository to your local machine:

   git clone https://github.com/your-username/marco.git
   cd marco
   

2. Navigate to the ML project folder where you want to train your model (e.g. your bag-of-words project):

   cd ~/projects/my-bag-of-words-model
   

3. Create and activate a Python Virtual Environment:

   # Create a virtual environment named 'venv'
   python3 -m venv venv
   
   # Activate it (You must do this every time you open a new terminal in this folder)
   source venv/bin/activate
   

   (You should now see (venv) at the start of your terminal prompt!)

4. Install Marco:

   # Point pip to the directory where you cloned the marco repository
   pip install -e /path/to/marco
   

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🛠️ Usage Guide

Once marco is installed in your virtual environment, you have access to the full CLI!

1. Initialize a Repository

Initialize Marco tracking in your current directory. This creates a .marco/ data versioning environment specific to that project.

marco init

2. Create an Immutable Version

Upload a text/CSV/TSV dataset to create an immutable version. Marco will compute a cryptographically secure SHA-256 hash using the raw data + the preprocessing configuration.

Interactive Mode: If you don't supply a configuration file, Marco will interactively guide you through building the preprocessing pipeline (Lowercasing, Tokenization, Stopwords Removal, Deduplicating).

marco upload my_dataset.csv -t v1-raw

Config Mode:

marco upload my_dataset.csv -c my_config.json -t v1-processed

3. List Versions

View all the versions you've created, along with their tags and timestamps.

marco list

4. Restore/Checkout Data

Extract the processed dataset from marco's storage back into your active workspace to use for model training.

marco restore v1-processed -o ./training_data.tsv

5. Start the Visual Dashboard

Open the Flask-powered web dashboard or the new React DAG visualizer to view dataset metadata, differences between versions, and complete data lineage trees.

Start the React DAG Comparison Dashboard (New):

marco generate-web

(This will automatically open your browser to http://localhost:7654 and load your local .marco graphs).

Start the legacy HTML Dashboard:

python -m marco.web.app --port 5000

6. Export / Import Versions

Easily share dataset versions with teammates by packing them into .tar.gz files.

# Export version 'v1-raw' to the 'exports' folder
marco export v1-raw ./exports/

# Import an archive sent to you by a coworker
marco import ./exports/marco_version_e5e0b767.tar.gz

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🧠 Architecture Overview

Marco decouples logic from the file system. All core engine operations sit inside marco/core/, including:

• locker.py: File-based concurrency control using .lock files.
• repository.py: CRUD operations for dataset versions and refs.json tagging.
• preprocessor.py: A robust Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) preprocessing engine.

Have fun building safer machine learning pipelines!