Interactive Progress View

DocETL can show a full-screen, live progress dashboard in your terminal while a pipeline runs: per-operation cost and timing, per-document status, and the output and prompt of any finished document.

The progress view: steps and operations on the left, a grid of documents in
the middle, and the selected document's detail on the right

Turning it on

Install the optional tui extra (which pulls in Textual):

pip install "docetl[tui]"

Then add interactive_ui: true at the top level of your config (next to default_model):

YAMLPython

default_model: gpt-4.1-nano
interactive_ui: true

pipeline:
  steps:
    - name: themes
      input: reviews
      operations:
        - extract_theme
        - canonicalize_themes
        - summarize_themes
  output:
    type: file
    path: output.json

# The interactive dashboard is a CLI feature: it starts when `docetl run`
# finds `interactive_ui: true` in the YAML config. Pipelines executed
# through the Python Frame API (.collect(), .show(), .write_json()) use
# the standard log output instead.
#
# To use the dashboard for a pipeline built in Python, export it to YAML,
# add `interactive_ui: true` at the top level, and run it with the CLI:

pipeline.to_yaml("pipeline.yaml")
# then: docetl run pipeline.yaml

And run the pipeline the usual way:

docetl run pipeline.yaml

The dashboard only starts in an interactive terminal. In a script, a CI job, or anywhere the output is piped, DocETL falls back to its normal log output, so the flag is safe to leave on.

What you see

There are three panels:

Left — operations. Every step and operation, with live status, counts, cost, and elapsed time. Total cost and time for the run are at the top.
Middle — documents. One circle per document for the selected operation. A filled circle is done (green), in progress (orange), or errored (red); a hollow circle has not started. The header shows the operation's progress.
Right — detail. The output of the document under the cursor, the prompt that produced it, and a note about where it came from. Documents appear here as soon as they finish, while the run is still going.

Moving around

Key	Action
`↑` / `↓`	select an operation
`Tab`	switch between the operations list and the document grid
`←` / `→`	move the cursor in the grid (and page through large grids)
`PgUp` / `PgDn`	page through the grid
`Enter`	inspect the document under the cursor
`q`	quit (the run keeps going)

What each kind of operation shows

The progress bar counts the unit of work for each operation, and the detail panel notes where a document came from.

Reduce counts groups, and a group shows how many documents were combined into it:

Split counts chunks, and a chunk shows which piece of its source document it is (for example, "chunk 2 of 5"):

Resolve and equijoin count comparisons as they are made. Their output documents aren't known until the operation finishes, so while it runs the header counts comparisons and the grid shows a ?:

Very large runs

For runs with tens of thousands of documents, the grid switches to a heatmap: each cell stands for a bucket of documents, shaded by how many are done. Live counts and per-operation totals still update.