Embedded UI

Experimental

The embedded web dashboard is experimental. Its DOM structure, URL paths, CSS class names, and the env vars listed below can all change without a deprecation cycle. Treat it as a local browsing convenience; do not build production tooling on top of its HTML or hard-code its routes into automation.

DearDiary boots a small in-process web dashboard alongside the REST API. The dashboard lets you browse projects, experiments, and iterations recorded by the default user, inspect parameters and metric charts for any iteration, and follow parent/child trial trees from a single page.

Configuration

The UI starts by default. Three env vars control it:

DEARDIARY_ENABLE_UI=true        # set to false to skip booting the UI server
DEARDIARY_UI_HOST=127.0.0.1     # bind address
DEARDIARY_UI_PORT=9001          # port the dashboard listens on

A single DearDiary.run(; env_file=".env") call boots the REST API and the dashboard on their respective ports. DearDiary.stop() closes both servers together.

What you see

Sidebar: A tree of projects to experiments to iterations. Child trials nest under their driver iteration so lineage stays visible at a glance. Each iteration label carries a status glyph (✓ succeeded, ▶ running, ✗ failed, ⊘ killed), a per-experiment ordinal, and a relative timestamp. Example: ✓ Iteration 3 · 12m ago. The link colour (yellow running, red failed, purple killed, default succeeded) reinforces the same signal. Ordinals are local to each experiment, so deleting a row renumbers the remaining iterations in the sidebar. The canonical database id appears in the detail pane header and the browser tab title for anyone who needs it.
Detail pane: A status badge, the experiment name, the created/ended timestamps, the parent-iteration link when present, the parameter table, and an inline-SVG chart of every metric series keyed by step. Hovering a point reveals a tooltip with the metric name, step, and value. The chart renders server-side; no external JS bundle is fetched.
Browser tab title: The title tracks the selected iteration as #42 · ExperimentName · DearDiary. The landing page renders as plain DearDiary.
Docs link: A small Docs ↗ anchor at the bottom of the sidebar opens this documentation site in a new tab.

Disabling the UI

Set DEARDIARY_ENABLE_UI=false in the env file. The REST API on DEARDIARY_PORT continues to run unchanged. Pick this for a headless CI runner or a container image that needs no browser-facing surface.

Known limitations

Single user. The dashboard reads as the seeded default user. No login screen, no multi-tenant view.
Read-only. Mutate state through the REST API or the Julia client; the UI exposes no edit affordances.
WebSocket-driven title updates. The browser tab title updates from the server via the live WebSocket. Slow connections may show stale title text for a second or two after a click.
Cold-start latency. The first request after DearDiary.run takes a few seconds while Bonito boots its renderer; every subsequent request serves in tens of milliseconds. A PrecompileTools workload absorbs part of this cost into Pkg.precompile.