freeze

Freeze stages until dvc unfreeze is used on them. Frozen stages are never executed by dvc repro.

Synopsis

usage: dvc freeze [-h] [-q | -v] targets [targets ...]

positional arguments:
  targets        Stages or .dvc files to freeze

Description

dvc freeze causes the stages indicated as targets to be considered not changed by dvc status and dvc repro. Stage reproduction will not regenerate outputs of frozen stages, even if their dependencies have changed, and even if --force is used.

Freezing a stage is useful to avoid syncing data from the top of its pipeline, and keep iterating on the last (non-frozen) stages only.

Note that import stages are frozen by default. Use dvc update to bring the import up to date from the data source. Unfreeze them before using dvc repro on a pipeline that needs their outputs.

Options

• -h, --help - prints the usage/help message, and exit.

• -q, --quiet - do not write anything to standard output. Exit with 0 if no problems arise, otherwise 1.

• -v, --verbose - displays detailed tracing information.

Examples

First, let's create a dummy stage that copies foo to bar:

$ echo foo > foo
$ dvc add foo
$ dvc stage add -n make_copy -d foo -o bar cp foo bar

See dvc stage add for more details.

Then, let's change the file foo that the stage make_copy depends on:

$ echo zoo > foo
$ dvc status
make_copy:
	changed deps:
		modified:           foo
foo.dvc:
	changed outs:
		modified:           foo

dvc status notices that foo has changed. Let's now freeze the make_copy stage and see what's the project status after that:

$ dvc freeze make_copy
$ dvc status
foo.dvc:
	changed outs:
		modified:           foo

DVC notices that foo changed due to the foo.dvc file that tracks this file (as outs), but the make_copy stage no longer records the change among its deps.

You can use dvc unfreeze to go back to the regular project status.