Registry

W&B Registry is a curated central repository of artifact versions within your organization. Users who have permission within your organization can download, share, and collaboratively manage the lifecycle of all artifacts, regardless of the team that user belongs to.

You can use the Registry to track artifact versions, audit the history of an artifact’s usage and changes, ensure governance and compliance of your artifacts, and automate downstream processes such as model CI/CD.

In summary, use W&B Registry to:

• Promote artifact versions that satisfy a machine learning task to other users in your organization.
• Organize artifacts with tags so that you can find or reference specific artifacts.
• Track an artifact’s lineage and audit the history of changes.
• Automate downstream processes such as model CI/CD.
• Limit who in your organization can access artifacts in each registry.

The preceding image shows the Registry App with “Model” and “Dataset” core registries along with custom registries.

Learn the basics

Each organization initially contains two registries that you can use to organize your model and dataset artifacts called Models and Datasets, respectively. You can create additional registries to organize other artifact types based on your organization’s needs.

Each registry consists of one or more collections. Each collection represents a distinct task or use case.

To add an artifact to a registry, you first log a specific artifact version to W&B. Each time you log an artifact, W&B automatically assigns a version to that artifact. Artifact versions use 0 indexing, so the first version is v0, the second version is v1, and so on.

Once you log an artifact to W&B, you can then link that specific artifact version to a collection in the registry.

As an example, the proceeding code example shows how to log and link a model artifact called “my_model.txt” to a collection named “first-collection” in the core registry:

1. Initialize a W&B run.
2. Log the artifact to W&B.
3. Specify the name of the collection and registry to link your artifact version to.
4. Link the artifact to the collection.

Save this Python code to a script and run it. W&B Python SDK version 0.18.6 or newer is required.

import wandb
import random

# Initialize a W&B run to track the artifact
run = wandb.init(project="registry_quickstart") 

# Create a simulated model file so that you can log it
with open("my_model.txt", "w") as f:
   f.write("Model: " + str(random.random()))

# Log the artifact to W&B
logged_artifact = run.log_artifact(
    artifact_or_path="./my_model.txt", 
    name="gemma-finetuned", 
    type="model" # Specifies artifact type
)

# Specify the name of the collection and registry
# you want to publish the artifact to
COLLECTION_NAME = "first-collection"
REGISTRY_NAME = "model"

# Link the artifact to the registry
run.link_artifact(
    artifact=logged_artifact, 
    target_path=f"wandb-registry-{REGISTRY_NAME}/{COLLECTION_NAME}"
)

W&B automatically creates a collection for you if the collection you specify in the returned run object’s link_artifact(target_path = "") method does not exist within the registry you specify.

Navigate to the Registry App to view artifact versions that you and other members of your organization publish. To do so, first navigate to W&B. Select Registry in the left sidebar below Applications. Select the “Model” registry. Within the registry, you should see the “first-collection” collection with your linked artifact version.

Once you link an artifact version to a collection within a registry, members of your organization can view, download, and manage your artifact versions, create downstream automations, and more if they have the proper permissions.

Enable W&B Registry

Based on your deployment type, satisfy the following conditions to enable W&B Registry:

Resources to get started

Depending on your use case, explore the following resources to get started with the W&B Registry:

• Check out the tutorial video:
  • Getting started with Registry from Weights & Biases
• Take the W&B Model CI/CD course and learn how to:
  • Use W&B Registry to manage and version your artifacts, track lineage, and promote models through different lifecycle stages.
  • Automate your model management workflows using webhooks.
  • Integrate the registry with external ML systems and tools for model evaluation, monitoring, and deployment.

Migrate from the legacy Model Registry to W&B Registry

The legacy Model Registry is scheduled for deprecation with the exact date not yet decided. Before deprecating the legacy Model Registry, W&B will migrate the contents of the legacy Model Registry to the W&B Registry.

See Migrating from legacy Model Registry for more information about the migration process from the legacy Model Registry to W&B Registry.

Until the migration occurs, W&B supports both the legacy Model Registry and the new Registry.

To view the legacy Model Registry, navigate to the Model Registry in the W&B App. A banner appears at the top of the page that enables you to use the legacy Model Registry App UI.

Reach out to support@wandb.com with any questions or to speak to the W&B Product Team about any concerns about the migration.