Setting up CI/CD

Even though developing a contextual assistant is different from developing traditional software, you should still follow software development best practices. Setting up a Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) pipeline ensures that incremental updates to your bot are improving it, not harming it.

• Overview
  Continous Integration (CI) is the practice of merging in code changes frequently and automatically testing changes as they are committed. Continuous Deployment (CD) means automatically deploying integrated changes to a staging or production environment. Together, they allow you to make more frequent improvements to your assistant and efficiently test and deploy those changes.

Continuous Integration (CI)

The best way to improve an assistant is with frequent incremental updates. No matter how small a change is, you want to be sure that it doesn’t introduce new problems or negatively impact the performance of your assistant.

It is usually best to run CI checks on merge / pull requests or on commit. Most tests are quick enough to run on every change. However, you can choose to run more resource-intensive tests only when certain files have been changed or when some other indicator is present. For example, if your code is hosted on Github, you can make a test run only if the pull request has a certain label (e.g. “NLU testing required”).

• Validate Data and Stories

Data validation verifies that there are no mistakes or major inconsistencies in your domain file, NLU data, or story data.

rasa data validate --fail-on-warnings --max-history <max_history>

If data validation results in errors, training a model will also fail. By including the --fail-on-warnings flag, validation will also fail on warnings about problems that won’t prevent training a model, but might indicate messy data, such as actions listed in the domain that aren’t used in any stories.

Data validation includes story structure validation. Story validation checks if you have any stories where different bot actions follow from the same dialogue history. Conflicts between stories will prevent a model from learning the correct pattern for a dialogue. Set the --max-history parameter to the value of max_history for the memoization policy in your config.yml. If you haven’t set one, use the default of 5.

• Train a Model

rasa train

Training a model verifies that your NLU pipeline and policy configurations are valid and trainable, and it provides a model to use for test conversations. If it passes the CI tests, then you can also upload the trained model to your server as part of the continuous deployment process.

• Test the Assistant
  Testing your trained model on test conversations is the best way to have confidence in how your assistant will act in certain situations. These stories, written in a modified story format, allow you to provide entire conversations and test that, given this user input, your model will behave in the expected manner.

rasa test --stories tests/conversation_tests.md --fail-on-prediction-errors

The --fail-on-prediction-errors flag ensures the test will fail if any test conversation fails.

• Compare NLU Performance
  If you’ve made significant changes to your NLU training data (e.g. splitting an intent into two intents or adding a lot of training examples), you should run a full NLU evaluation. You’ll want to compare the performance of the NLU model without your changes to an NLU model with your changes.

You can do this by running NLU testing in cross-validation mode:

rasa test nlu --cross-validation

• Test Action Code
  The approach used to test your action code will depend on how it is implemented. For example, if you connect to external APIs, it is recommended to write unit tests to ensure that those APIs respond as expected to common inputs. However you test your action code, you should include these tests in your CI pipeline so that they run each time you make changes.

Continuous Deployment (CD)

To get improvements out to your users frequently, you will want to automate as much of the deployment process as possible.

CD steps usually run on push or merge to a certain branch, once CI checks have succeeded.

• Deploy your Rasa Model
  If you ran end-to-end tests in your CI pipeline, you’ll already have a trained model. You can set up your CD pipeline to upload the trained model to your Rasa server if the CI results are satisfactory. For example, to upload a model to Rasa X:

curl -k -F "model=@models/my_model.tar.gz" "https://example.rasa.com/api/projects/default/models?api_token={your_api_token}"

• Deploy your Action Server
  You can automate building and uploading a new image for your action server, to an image repository for each update to your action code. As noted above, you should be careful with automatically deploying a new image tag to production if the action server would be incompatible with the current production model.

Example CI/CD pipelines

As examples, see the CI/CD pipelines for Sara, the Rasa assistant that you can talk to in the Rasa Docs, and Carbon Bot. Both use Github Actions as a CI/CD tool.

These examples are just two of many possibilities. If you have a CI/CD setup you like, please share it with the Rasa community on the forum.

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