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

Git-Worktrees-01

Truenas-And-Wireguard