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Offline Mode

You can put Dorsal into Offline Mode by setting the DORSAL_OFFLINE environment variable.

  • Offline Mode will block any calls to the DorsalHub API from functions and classes within Dorsal, such as those for accessing file records or validating tags and annotations.

  • Offline Mode will not block network calls to or from resources other than the DorsalHub API, nor will it modify any environment settings external to Dorsal.

    • For example, if your Pipeline includes a custom Annotation Model which downloads model weights at run-time from huggingface, this will continue to work in Offline Mode.

Enable Offline Mode if you are integrating Dorsal into a service and do not require any DorsalHub API features.

Why not just not set an API Key?

Simply not setting an API Key in Dorsal is a de facto offline mode, as the DorsalHub API already rejects any requests without a valid API Key.

However, if you are using Dorsal in a strictly offline way (e.g. integrated into another service, as a pure extraction tool) then explicitly setting DORSAL_OFFLINE is better:

  • It's intentional: Prevent Dorsal from even trying to authenticate
  • It's explicit: Catch DorsalOfflineError instead of AuthError

Enabling Offline Mode

Setting this variable puts Dorsal into offline mode, preventing Dorsal from making requests to the DorsalHub API

export DORSAL_OFFLINE=1

$env:DORSAL_OFFLINE="1"

set DORSAL_OFFLINE=1