Demo Notebooks

Feast can generate tailored Jupyter notebooks for any Feast project. The notebooks adapt to your feature_store.yaml configuration and provide a hands-on walkthrough of core Feast functionality.

What you get

For each project discovered, Feast creates a directory with notebooks covering:

Notebook	Description
01 — Feature Store Overview	Explore registered entities, feature views, feature services, and data sources.
02 — Historical Feature Retrieval	Build a training dataset with point-in-time correct joins using `get_historical_features`.
03 — Online Feature Serving	Materialize features to the online store and retrieve them at low latency with `get_online_features`.

The content adapts automatically based on:

Online / offline store types — descriptions reflect the actual backends configured.
Registry type — local registries include feast apply; remote registries use refresh_registry().
Authentication — auth details from feature_store.yaml are surfaced when configured.
Vector search — a vector/RAG retrieval section is included when embeddings are detected.

Prerequisites

Python 3.9+
Feast installed (pip install feast)
A feature repository with a valid feature_store.yaml

Using the CLI

Run the command from (or pointing to) a directory containing feature_store.yaml:

bash

feast demo-notebooks

This searches for feature_store.yaml in the current directory and every file inside the feast-config/ directory. Each file in feast-config/ is treated as a separate project config. For each project found, notebooks are written to ./feast-demo-notebooks/<project>/.

Options

Option	Default	Description
`-o, --output-dir`	`./feast-demo-notebooks`	Root directory for generated notebooks
`--overwrite`	`false`	Overwrite if the output directory already exists

bash

# Write to a custom directory
feast demo-notebooks -o ./my-notebooks

# Overwrite existing notebooks
feast demo-notebooks --overwrite

# Use --chdir to point at a different feature repo
feast -c /path/to/feature_repo demo-notebooks

Using the Python SDK

python

from feast import copy_demo_notebooks

copy_demo_notebooks()

Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
`output_dir`	`str`	`"./feast-demo-notebooks"`	Root directory for generated notebooks
`repo_path`	`str`	`"."`	Directory to search for `feature_store.yaml` files
`overwrite`	`bool`	`False`	Overwrite existing output directories

Examples

python

from feast import copy_demo_notebooks

# Default — searches current directory, writes to ./feast-demo-notebooks/
copy_demo_notebooks()

# Custom paths
copy_demo_notebooks(
    output_dir="/home/user/notebooks",
    repo_path="/home/user/feast-projects/my-repo/feature_repo",
    overwrite=True,
)

Multi-project repositories

If your feast-config/ directory contains multiple files, each is treated as a separate project and a dedicated notebook directory is created:

feast-demo-notebooks/
├── project_alpha/
│   ├── 01_feature_store_overview.ipynb
│   ├── 02_historical_features_training.ipynb
│   └── 03_online_features_serving.ipynb
└── project_beta/
    ├── 01_feature_store_overview.ipynb
    ├── 02_historical_features_training.ipynb
    └── 03_online_features_serving.ipynb

Running the notebooks

Open any generated notebook in Jupyter, JupyterLab, or VS Code and run cells from top to bottom. Each notebook:

Configures the path to your feature_store.yaml automatically (no manual editing needed).
Connects to the feature store using the Feast Python SDK.
Walks through relevant operations with real data from your project.

{% hint style="info" %} The first notebook (01 — Overview) includes a prerequisites check and feast apply / registry sync step. Subsequent notebooks assume these have already been completed. {% endhint %}