Rasa: Auto Reload actions on editing

[bhavaniravi]

Auto reloading actions server on edit:
Currently, every time I edit the actions file I have to stop the rasa actions server and restart it. It is kind of overkill since you already built your model and just tweaking with actions.

Overview of the Solution:
Sanic server comes with a DEBUG mode. We can incorporate it into rasa run actions command as an option to enable reloading server.

Definition of Done:
What needs to be there to consider this feature as done?

• [ ] Tests are added
• [ ] Feature is documented
• [ ] rasa run actions --debug

[bhavaniravi]

I can work on this if we think this feature is important.

[akelad]

Thanks for the suggestion! what does the implementation for that look like? cc @wochinge

[erohmensing]

@bhavaniravi just my 2 cents, I think as we have --debug already mostly for increased logs, I wouldn't like this implementation to go under that flag, as it would be surprise new changed functionality. I'd prefer a new descriptive flag, for example --hot-reload or something like that. not sure what @wochinge thinks though

[bhavaniravi]

I am not hooked to what it's called. I think this feature would help developing actions much easier

[wochinge]

I agree with @erohmensing . We shouldn't do this with --debug. How about using --auto-reload or --hot-reload and then setting auto_reload=True ( https://sanic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/sanic/debug_mode.html#manually-setting-auto-reload).

[wochinge]

@bhavaniravi Did you try out whether this actually works when you change the actions.py?

[bhavaniravi]

I checked out rasa_sdk codebase and executor is written in such a way that the function references are held in a dict and called accordingly, which means the edit on those references will not reload the Flask or WsgiServer used.

[wochinge]

that's what I thought 😞 Thanks for checking it out!

[tmbo]

I am not sure iti s relevant how the functions are stored as long as the modules are loaded.

[tmbo]

The only thing we should need to do is "reload" the function in debug mode

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[erohmensing]

@tmbo so it is possible then? In that case @bhavaniravi are you still interested in implementing this functionality?

[tmbo]

yes, sanic already has this build in, so we should reuse it's hot reload functionality. not sure if we run into issues though, e.g. https://github.com/huge-success/sanic/issues/1248