Anonymous mode

Are you publishing code that you want anyone to be able to run easily? Use anonymous mode to let someone run your code, see a W&B dashboard, and visualize results without needing to create a W&B account first.

Allow results to be logged in anonymous mode with:

import wandb

wandb.init(anonymous="allow")

For example, the proceeding code snippet shows how to create and log an artifact with W&B:

import wandb

wandb.require("core")

run = wandb.init(anonymous="allow")

artifact = wandb.Artifact(name="art1", type="foo")
artifact.add_file(local_path="path/to/file")
run.log_artifact(artifact)

run.finish()

Try the example notebook to see how anonymous mode works.

How does someone without an account see results?

If someone runs your script and you have to set anonymous="allow":

1. Auto-create temporary account: W&B checks for an account that's already signed in. If there's no account, W&B automatically creates a new anonymous account and save that API key for the session.
2. Log results quickly: The user can run and re-run the script, and automatically see results show up in the W&B dashboard UI. These unclaimed anonymous runs will be available for 7 days.
3. Claim data when it's useful: Once the user finds valuable results in W&B, they can easily click a button in the banner at the top of the page to save their run data to a real account. If they don't claim a run, it will be deleted after 7 days.

caution

Anonymous run links are sensitive. These links allow anyone to view and claim the results of an experiment for 7 days, so make sure to only share links with people you trust. If you're trying to share results publicly, but hide the author's identity, contact support@wandb.com to share more about your use case.

What happens to users with existing accounts?

If you set anonymous="allow" in your script, W&B checks to make sure there's not an existing account first, before creating an anonymous account. This means that if a W&B user finds your script and runs it, their results will be logged correctly to their account, just like a normal run.

What are features that are not available to anonymous users?

• No persistent data: Runs are only saved for 7 days in an anonymous account. You can claim anonymous run data by saving it to a real account.

• No artifact logging: Runs print a warning on the command line that you can't log an artifact to an anonymous run:

  wandb: WARNING Artifacts logged anonymously cannot be claimed and expire after 7 days.

• No profile or settings pages: Certain pages aren't available in the UI, because they're only useful for real accounts.