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:

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

# 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

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

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:

1. Configures the path to your feature_store.yaml automatically (no manual editing needed).
2. Connects to the feature store using the Feast Python SDK.
3. 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 %}