Why Should We Use Hydra for Effective Program Parameter Management?

1. What is Hydra?

Hydra is an open-source Python library and framework designed to help manage configuration and parameters in complex software projects. It’s especially useful for managing parameters in machine learning experiments, scientific computing, and other applications where you need to handle a wide range of configuration options.

2. First reason to use Hydra: hierarchical configuration

Why should I use Hydra since Python already provides us with a powerful argument parser? It is true that Python has its own argument parser such as argparse. However, Hydra is better than argparse when it comes to Hierarchical Configuration.

Hydra supports hierarchical configurations, allowing you to organize and inherit settings in a tree-like structure. This is beneficial for managing different levels of configuration in a project, which argparse does not handle as elegantly. Take the following config.yaml file as an example:

# config.yaml 
defaults:
  - data
  - process
  - custom_setting 

In this YAML file, it is composed of three settings:

• setting for data , corresponding to data.yaml
• setting for process , corresponding to process.yaml
• custom setting for the current program custom_setting , corresponding to custom_setting.yaml