Parameters and credentials¶

This page explains what parameters and credentials are in Kedro, and how they work conceptually.

Parameters¶

What are parameters?¶

Project parameters in Kedro are defined inside the conf folder in a file that has a filename starting with parameters, or are located inside a folder with name starting with parameters. By default, in a new Kedro project, parameters are defined in the parameters.yml file, which is located in the project's conf/base directory. This file contains a dictionary of key-value pairs, where each key is a parameter name and each value is the corresponding parameter value. These parameters can serve as input to nodes and are used when running the pipeline. By using parameters, you can make your Kedro pipelines more flexible and easier to configure, since you can change the behaviour of your nodes by modifying the parameters.yml file.

How parameters work¶

If you have a group of parameters that determine the hyperparameters of your model, define them in a single location such as conf/base/parameters.yml. Keeping everything together reduces the chances of missing an update elsewhere in the codebase.

Parameters are added to the Data Catalog by Kedro as MemoryDatasets, which makes them accessible to your pipeline nodes like any other dataset.

To learn how to use parameters in practice, see the how-to guide on working with parameters and credentials.

Credentials¶

What are credentials?¶

For security reasons, we strongly recommend that you do not commit any credentials or other secrets to version control. Kedro is set up so that, by default, if a file inside the conf folder (and its subdirectories) contains credentials in its name, it is ignored by git.

Credentials configuration can be used on its own directly in code or fed into the DataCatalog. If you prefer to store credentials in environment variables rather than a file, you can do so with the OmegaConfigLoader. See how to load credentials from environment variables in the parameters and credentials how-to guide.

To learn how to work with credentials in practice, see the how-to guide on working with parameters and credentials.