tensorflowtensorboardgoogle-colaboratory

Can I use TensorBoard with Google Colab?

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

Solution

  • 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'])"