Environment persistence

Studios persist their environments when sleeping and switching machines. Jobs use forks of the environment so that the environment you develop is the same you scale.

There are a lot of nuances and details about how we do persistency that we will not cover in this guide. However, we will discuss the common questions that cover the main use cases.

Filesystem

Everything in the Studio home (~, /teamspace/studios/this_studio) is persisted except for node_modules, which should be recreated when needed. Download any files, build packages and whatever else you want!

Python environment

Any packages you install or build are persisted. You can install packages in editable mode, edit your site-packages, and anything else you might need.

Note that we don't allow creating additional environments or virtual environments within the Studio. If you need to create a new environment, start a new Studio.

VSCode settings

Any extensions installed, or changes you make to your VSCode on the Studio will apply to the VSCode across ALL your Studios. For example, if you install Github Copilot, it will be available in all your Studios.

JupyterLab settings

JupyterLab settings are not persisted.

System packages

Any system packages you install will be persisted. We recommend you install everything via apt-get.

If you install packages in non standard ways or place them in non standard locations, there is a chance they will not be persisted. This is for your security.

If you rely additional binaries that aren't available through apt-get, we recommend placing them somewhere in your Studio home (~, /teamspace/studios/this_studio) and adding them to the PATH in your .zshrc, .bashrc, .profile, or similar. For example:

export PATH="/teamspace/studios/this_studio/bin:${PATH}"

Docker images

Feel free to build docker images on the Studio. They are currently not persisted, if you are interested in this feature please reach out to us at support@lightning.ai.