Secrets and Environment Variables#

Environment variables are a powerful way to pass configuration and secrets to your tasks. There are two types of environment variables in SkyPilot:

User-specified environment variables#

User-specified environment variables are useful for passing secrets and any arguments or configurations needed for your tasks. They are made available in file_mounts, setup, and run.

You can specify environment variables to be made available to a task in two ways:

  • envs field (dict) in a task YAML:

    envs:
  MYVAR: val

  • --env flag in sky launch/exec CLI (takes precedence over the above)

Tip

To mark an environment variable as required and make SkyPilot forcefully check its existence (errors out if not specified), set it to an empty string or null in the task YAML. For example, WANDB_API_KEY and HF_TOKEN in the following task YAML are marked as required:

envs:
  WANDB_API_KEY:
  HF_TOKEN: null
  MYVAR: val

The file_mounts, setup, and run sections of a task YAML can access the variables via the ${MYVAR} syntax.

Passing secrets#

We recommend passing secrets to any node(s) executing your task by first making it available in your current shell, then using --env SECRET to pass it to SkyPilot:

$ sky launch -c mycluster --env HF_TOKEN --env WANDB_API_KEY task.yaml
$ sky exec mycluster --env WANDB_API_KEY task.yaml

Tip

You do not need to pass the value directly such as --env WANDB_API_KEY=1234. When the value is not specified (e.g., --env WANDB_API_KEY), SkyPilot reads it from local environment variables.

Using in file_mounts#

# Sets default values for some variables; can be overridden by --env.
envs:
  MY_BUCKET: skypilot-temp-gcs-test
  MY_LOCAL_PATH: tmp-workdir
  MODEL_SIZE: 13b

file_mounts:
    /mydir:
        name: ${MY_BUCKET}  # Name of the bucket.
        mode: MOUNT

    /another-dir2:
        name: ${MY_BUCKET}-2
        source: ["~/${MY_LOCAL_PATH}"]

    /checkpoint/${MODEL_SIZE}: ~/${MY_LOCAL_PATH}

The values of these variables are filled in by SkyPilot at task YAML parse time.

Read more at examples/using_file_mounts_with_env_vars.yaml.

Using in setup and run#

All user-specified environment variables are exported to a task’s setup and run commands (i.e., accessible when they are being run).

For example, this is useful for passing secrets (see below) or passing configurations:

# Sets default values for some variables; can be overridden by --env.
envs:
  MODEL_NAME: decapoda-research/llama-65b-hf

run: |
  python train.py --model_name ${MODEL_NAME} <other args>

$ sky launch --env MODEL_NAME=decapoda-research/llama-7b-hf task.yaml  # Override.

See complete examples at llm/vllm/serve.yaml and llm/vicuna/train.yaml.

SkyPilot environment variables#

SkyPilot exports several predefined environment variables made available during a task’s execution. These variables contain information about the current cluster or task, which can be useful for distributed frameworks such as torch.distributed, OpenMPI, etc. See examples in Distributed Multi-Node Jobs and Managed Jobs.

The values of these variables are filled in by SkyPilot at task execution time. You can access these variables in the following ways:

  • In the task YAML’s setup/run commands (a Bash script), access them using the ${MYVAR} syntax;

  • In the program(s) launched in setup/run, access them using the language’s standard method (e.g., os.environ for Python).

The setup and run stages can access different sets of SkyPilot environment variables:

Environment variables for setup#

Name

Definition

Example

SKYPILOT_SETUP_NODE_RANK

Rank (an integer ID from 0 to num_nodes-1) of the node being set up.

0

SKYPILOT_SETUP_NODE_IPS

A string of IP addresses of the nodes in the cluster with the same order as the node ranks, where each line contains one IP address.

Note that this is not necessarily the same as the nodes in run stage: the setup stage runs on all nodes of the cluster, while the run stage can run on a subset of nodes.

 
1.2.3.4
3.4.5.6

SKYPILOT_NUM_NODES

Number of nodes in the cluster. Same value as $(echo "$SKYPILOT_NODE_IPS" | wc -l).

2

SKYPILOT_TASK_ID

A unique ID assigned to each task.

This environment variable is available only when the task is submitted with sky launch --detach-setup, or run as a managed spot job.

Refer to the description in the environment variables for run.

sky-2023-07-06-21-18-31-563597_myclus_1

For managed spot jobs: sky-managed-2023-07-06-21-18-31-563597_my-job-name_1-0

SKYPILOT_CLUSTER_INFO

A JSON string containing information about the cluster. To access the information, you could parse the JSON string in bash echo $SKYPILOT_CLUSTER_INFO | jq .cloud or in Python :

import json
json.loads(
  os.environ['SKYPILOT_CLUSTER_INFO']
)['cloud']

{“cluster_name”: “my-cluster-name”, “cloud”: “GCP”, “region”: “us-central1”, “zone”: “us-central1-a”}

SKYPILOT_SERVE_REPLICA_ID

The ID of a replica within the service (starting from 1). Available only for a service’s replica task.

1

Since setup commands always run on all nodes of a cluster, SkyPilot ensures both of these environment variables (the ranks and the IP list) never change across multiple setups on the same cluster.

Environment variables for run#

Name

Definition

Example

SKYPILOT_NODE_RANK

Rank (an integer ID from 0 to num_nodes-1) of the node executing the task. Read more here.

0

SKYPILOT_NODE_IPS

A string of IP addresses of the nodes reserved to execute the task, where each line contains one IP address. Read more here.

 
1.2.3.4

SKYPILOT_NUM_NODES

Number of nodes assigned to execute the current task. Same value as $(echo "$SKYPILOT_NODE_IPS" | wc -l). Read more here.

1

SKYPILOT_NUM_GPUS_PER_NODE

Number of GPUs reserved on each node to execute the task; the same as the count in accelerators: <name>:<count> (rounded up if a fraction). Read more here.

0

SKYPILOT_TASK_ID

A unique ID assigned to each task in the format “sky-<timestamp>_<cluster-name>_<task-id>”. Useful for logging purposes: e.g., use a unique output path on the cluster; pass to Weights & Biases; etc. Each task’s logs are stored on the cluster at ~/sky_logs/${SKYPILOT_TASK_ID%%_*}/tasks/*.log.

If a task is run as a managed spot job, then all recoveries of that job will have the same ID value. The ID is in the format “sky-managed-<timestamp>_<job-name>(_<task-name>)_<job-id>-<task-id>”, where <task-name> will appear when a pipeline is used, i.e., more than one task in a managed spot job. Read more here.

sky-2023-07-06-21-18-31-563597_myclus_1

For managed spot jobs: sky-managed-2023-07-06-21-18-31-563597_my-job-name_1-0

SKYPILOT_CLUSTER_INFO

A JSON string containing information about the cluster. To access the information, you could parse the JSON string in bash echo $SKYPILOT_CLUSTER_INFO | jq .cloud or in Python :

import json
json.loads(
  os.environ['SKYPILOT_CLUSTER_INFO']
)['cloud']

{“cluster_name”: “my-cluster-name”, “cloud”: “GCP”, “region”: “us-central1”, “zone”: “us-central1-a”}

SKYPILOT_SERVE_REPLICA_ID

The ID of a replica within the service (starting from 1). Available only for a service’s replica task.

1