Playing around with Modal Labs

One of the first things I tried was a regular cron job...

        
@stub.function(
    schedule=modal.Period(minutes=59), secret=modal.Secret.from_name("my-dummy-secret")
)
def say_hi():
    now = time.ctime()
    secret = os.environ.get("dummy-secret")
    print(f"Hello {os.environ.get('USER', 'Rodney')} at {now}")
    print(f"{secret=}")

This can get deployed with modal deploy --name <app name> <path to .py file with the stub and function defined in it>

This function gets deployed as an app that I conveniently call say_hi (as far as I can tell the app name can be anything - as I add functions to this same app and deploy with the same name to get a new version)

Notice that this also is an example of giving access to a secret - defined in the Modal Labs dashboard

We can take a look at the apps running at https://modal.com/apps

I then added another function to experiment with custom container images and saw then that Modal will just slap a new version on anything provisioned with the same name (intuitive enough for sure) so when I add functions to my .py script and run modal deploy --name say_hi myscript.py over and over, the app called say_hi in the Modal apps dashboard just gets a new version

This means I can spin up several instances of functionally the same app but with different names/versions etc... Q: Maybe there's gitops or policy stuff builtin to app names then?

I needed to take down an app I deployed as a duplicate but you don't stop apps by name, you stop them by an id... see below

        
modal-sandbox/modal_sandbox   main   ×1  ×9 via   v3.10.6(modal-sandbox)
✗ modal app stop --help

 Usage: modal app stop [OPTIONS] APP_ID

 Stop an app.

╭─ Arguments ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│ *    app_id      TEXT  [default: None] [required]                                                                                                │
╰──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯
╭─ Options ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│ --help          Show this message and exit.                                                                                                      │
╰──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯


modal-sandbox/modal_sandbox   main   ×1  ×9 via   v3.10.6(modal-sandbox)
❯ modal app list
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ App ID                    ┃ Description         ┃ State    ┃ Creation time             ┃ Stop time                 ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ ap-lzy1AAuVy7POFkUcDKRxpQ │ print_info          │ deployed │ 2022-12-28 20:59:07-06:00 │                           │
│ ap-qYjE45dciqgT3C3CpNp3RL │ say_hi              │ deployed │ 2022-12-28 19:49:22-06:00 │                           │
│ ap-X7FYneUeYV5IKHcyirSb87 │ link-scraper        │ stopped  │ 2022-12-28 15:39:02-06:00 │ 2022-12-28 15:39:04-06:00 │
│ ap-UOXTUU4uSRx2UZypJOcAsk │ example-get-started │ stopped  │ 2022-12-28 15:17:47-06:00 │ 2022-12-28 15:17:49-06:00 │
└───────────────────────────┴─────────────────────┴──────────┴───────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────┘

modal-sandbox/modal_sandbox   main   ×1  ×9 via   v3.10.6(modal-sandbox)
❯ modal app stop ap-lzy1AAuVy7POFkUcDKRxpQ

Git warning!

I ran modal deploy ... after comitting some stuff I wanted to try BUT I had changes in my file I didn't want to deploy... some git safety would be nice for deployment!

git stash && modal deploy .. && git stash pop

Question for Modal team - in my modal sandbox repo at commit:

        
aab6162 (HEAD -> main) HEAD@{1}: commit: print base version of my own image to prove it to me
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+)

An environment variable, BASE_VERSION that I expect to be in my base image was not available to the python function in my Modal app... hopefully the log is still here

GitHub Actions

I think it'd be easy to deploy from GH actions... just need an API Key...

Deployment

Without gitops it's already ahrd to manage my versions... need to get that built in either to github or locally sooooon

Nomad?? :D