💻 Demo a Union.ai cluster locally
The Flyte 2 devbox is a great way to try a simplified Union.ai cluster on your local machine.

Run locally on the devbox

The devbox is a lightweight local cluster that runs on your machine with Docker. It includes a UI preview, scheduler, and object store, so you can test remote execution without deploying to a real cluster.

What you’ll need

  • Python 3.10+ in a virtual environment
  • Docker installed and running
  • kubectl

Install the SDK

If you haven’t already, install the flyte package:

pip install flyte

Start the devbox

Launch the local cluster:

CPUGPU
flyte start devbox
flyte start devbox --gpu
The --gpu flag requires an NVIDIA-enabled host. It currently does not support Apple Silicon or AMD GPUs.

Devbox start

This pulls the necessary containers and starts a local Flyte instance. Once ready, the Flyte UI is available at http://localhost:30080.

The first start may take a few minutes while Docker images are downloaded.

Check the devbox status

flyte get devbox requires flyte 2.6.2 or later.

To see whether the devbox is up, and where it is:

flyte get devbox

This reports the run state, the UI and image registry endpoints, the container image version in use, and where the cluster keeps its state on disk. It is the quickest way to tell a devbox that is still starting from one that is ready.

Add --no-probes to skip the readiness probe and the container resource sample, which makes the check faster and works offline:

flyte get devbox --no-probes

For a machine-readable report, pass an output format to the top-level command:

flyte -of json-raw get devbox

Configure

Create a config file that points to the devbox:

flyte create config --devbox

This creates .flyte/config.yaml configured to talk to your local devbox cluster.

The --devbox flag requires flyte 2.6.1 or later. It is a shortcut for the explicit form, which you need on earlier versions:

flyte create config \
    --endpoint localhost:30080 \
    --project flytesnacks \
    --domain development \
    --builder local \
    --insecure

Both forms write the same config file. One difference: in an interactive terminal the explicit form offers to reuse a Docker login as your image registry, while --devbox skips that prompt, because the devbox pushes to its own in-cluster registry.

--devbox cannot be combined with --endpoint, but you can still override the project and domain alongside it:

flyte create config --devbox --project my-project --domain staging

Run a workflow on the devbox

Using the same hello.py from the Quickstart:

hello.py
# hello.py

import flyte

# The `hello_env` TaskEnvironment is assigned to the variable `env`.
# It is then used in the `@env.task` decorator to define tasks.
# The environment groups configuration for all tasks defined within it.
env = flyte.TaskEnvironment(name="hello_env")

# We use the `@env.task` decorator to define a task called `fn`.
@env.task
def fn(x: int) -> int: # Type annotations are required
    slope, intercept = 2, 5
    return slope * x + intercept

# We also use the `@env.task` decorator to define another task called `main`.
# This is the entrypoint task of the workflow.
# It calls the `fn` task defined above multiple times using `flyte.map`.
@env.task
def main(x_list: list[int] = list(range(10))) -> float:
    y_list = list(flyte.map(fn, x_list)) # flyte.map is like Python map, but runs in parallel.
    y_mean = sum(y_list) / len(y_list)
    return y_mean

Run it on the devbox:

flyte run hello.py main

Without the --local flag, the workflow runs on the devbox cluster rather than in your local Python process. Tasks execute inside containers, just like they would on a remote cluster.

View results in the UI

Open http://localhost:30080 to see your workflow execution in the Flyte UI. You can inspect task inputs, outputs, logs, and execution timelines.

Devbox UI

Stop the devbox

When you’re done, shut down the cluster:

flyte stop devbox

Inline configuration

Skip the config file entirely by passing parameters directly.

ProgrammaticCLI

Use flyte.init:

flyte.init(
    endpoint="localhost:30080",
    project="flytesnacks",
    domain="development",
    insecure=True,
)

Some parameters go after flyte, others after the subcommand:

flyte \
    --endpoint localhost:30080 \
    --insecure \
    --builder local \
    run \
    --domain development \
    --project flytesnacks \
    hello.py \
    main

See the CLI reference for details.

Delete the devbox

flyte delete devbox  # add the --volume flag to delete the Docker volume

Using a CUDA-enabled GPU host

If you started the devbox with flyte start devbox --gpu, you can use GPUs in your workflows.

import flyte

env = flyte.TaskEnvironment(
    name="gpu_env",
    resources=flyte.Resources(gpu=1),
)

@env.task
def gpu_task() -> bool:
    return torch.cuda.is_available()  # returns True if CUDA (provided by a GPU) is available

Next steps

When you’re ready to run on a remote Flyte cluster, see Run on a remote cluster to configure the CLI and SDK.