DVC Files

There are a few special DVC file formats that enable its features:

• Files ending with the .dvc extension ("dot DVC files") are placeholders to track data files and directories. A DVC project usually has one .dvc file per large data file or directory being tracked.

• dvc.yaml files (or pipelines files) specify stages that form the pipeline(s) of a project, and how they connect (dependency graph or DAG).

  These normally have a matching dvc.lock file to record the pipeline state and track its outputs.

Both .dvc files and dvc.yaml use human-friendly YAML 1.2 schemas, described below. We encourage you to get familiar with them so you may create, generate, and edit them on your own.

These metafiles should be versioned with Git (in Git-enabled repositories).

See DVC Internals for the contents of the .dvc/ directory.

See also .dvcignore.