docs/source/clis.md

# Command Line Interfaces (CLIs)

TRL provides a powerful command-line interface (CLI) to fine-tune large language models (LLMs) using methods like Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and more. The CLI abstracts away much of the boilerplate, letting you launch training jobs quickly and reproducibly.

Currently supported commands are:

#### Training Commands

- `trl dpo`: fine-tune a LLM with DPO
- `trl grpo`: fine-tune a LLM with GRPO
- `trl kto`: fine-tune a LLM with KTO
- `trl sft`: fine-tune a LLM with SFT

#### Other Commands

- `trl env`: get the system information
- `trl vllm-serve`: serve a model with vLLM

## Fine-Tuning with the TRL CLI

### Basic Usage

You can launch training directly from the CLI by specifying required arguments like the model and dataset:

<hfoptions id="command_line">
<hfoption id="SFT">

```bash
trl sft \
  --model_name_or_path Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B \
  --dataset_name stanfordnlp/imdb
```

</hfoption>
<hfoption id="DPO">

```bash
trl dpo \
  --model_name_or_path Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B \
  --dataset_name anthropic/hh-rlhf
```

</hfoption>
</hfoptions>

### Using Configuration Files

To keep your CLI commands clean and reproducible, you can define all training arguments in a YAML configuration file:

<hfoptions id="config_file">
<hfoption id="SFT">

```yaml
# sft_config.yaml
model_name_or_path: Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B
dataset_name: stanfordnlp/imdb
```

Launch with:

```bash
trl sft --config sft_config.yaml
```

</hfoption>
<hfoption id="DPO">

```yaml
# dpo_config.yaml
model_name_or_path: Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B
dataset_name: anthropic/hh-rlhf
```

Launch with:

```bash
trl dpo --config dpo_config.yaml
```

</hfoption>
</hfoptions>

### Scaling Up with Accelerate

TRL CLI natively supports [🤗 Accelerate](https://huggingface.co/docs/accelerate), making it easy to scale training across multiple GPUs, machines, or use advanced setups like DeepSpeed — all from the same CLI.

You can pass any `accelerate launch` arguments directly to `trl`, such as `--num_processes`. For more information see [Using accelerate launch](https://huggingface.co/docs/accelerate/en/basic_tutorials/launch#using-accelerate-launch).

<hfoptions id="launch_args">
<hfoption id="SFT inline">

```bash
trl sft \
  --model_name_or_path Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B \
  --dataset_name stanfordnlp/imdb \
  --num_processes 4
```

</hfoption>
<hfoption id="SFT w/ config file">

```yaml
# sft_config.yaml
model_name_or_path: Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B
dataset_name: stanfordnlp/imdb
num_processes: 4
```

Launch with:

```bash
trl sft --config sft_config.yaml
```

</hfoption>
<hfoption id="DPO inline">

```bash
trl dpo \
  --model_name_or_path Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B \
  --dataset_name anthropic/hh-rlhf \
  --num_processes 4
```

</hfoption>
<hfoption id="DPO w/ config file">

```yaml
# dpo_config.yaml
model_name_or_path: Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B
dataset_name: anthropic/hh-rlhf
num_processes: 4
```

Launch with:

```bash
trl dpo --config dpo_config.yaml
```
</hfoption>
</hfoptions>

### Using `--accelerate_config` for Accelerate Configuration

The `--accelerate_config` flag lets you easily configure distributed training with [🤗 Accelerate](https://github.com/huggingface/accelerate). This flag accepts either:

* the name of a predefined config profile (built into TRL), or
* a path to a custom Accelerate YAML config file.

#### Predefined Config Profiles

TRL provides several ready-to-use Accelerate configs to simplify common training setups:

| Name         | Description                         |
| ------------ | ----------------------------------- |
| `fsdp1`      | Fully Sharded Data Parallel Stage 1 |
| `fsdp2`      | Fully Sharded Data Parallel Stage 2 |
| `zero1`      | DeepSpeed ZeRO Stage 1              |
| `zero2`      | DeepSpeed ZeRO Stage 2              |
| `zero3`      | DeepSpeed ZeRO Stage 3              |
| `multi_gpu`  | Multi-GPU training                  |
| `single_gpu` | Single-GPU training                 |

To use one of these, just pass the name to `--accelerate_config`. TRL will automatically load the corresponding config file from `trl/accelerate_config/`.

#### Example Usage

<hfoptions id="accelerate_config">
<hfoption id="SFT inline">

```bash
trl sft \
  --model_name_or_path Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B \
  --dataset_name stanfordnlp/imdb \
  --accelerate_config zero2  # or path/to/my/accelerate/config.yaml
```

</hfoption>
<hfoption id="SFT w/ config file">

```yaml
# sft_config.yaml
model_name_or_path: Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B
dataset_name: stanfordnlp/imdb
accelerate_config: zero2  # or path/to/my/accelerate/config.yaml
```

Launch with:

```bash
trl sft --config sft_config.yaml
```

</hfoption>
<hfoption id="DPO inline">

```bash
trl dpo \
  --model_name_or_path Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B \
  --dataset_name anthropic/hh-rlhf \
  --accelerate_config zero2  # or path/to/my/accelerate/config.yaml
```

</hfoption>
<hfoption id="DPO w/ config file">

```yaml
# dpo_config.yaml
model_name_or_path: Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B
dataset_name: anthropic/hh-rlhf
accelerate_config: zero2  # or path/to/my/accelerate/config.yaml
```

Launch with:

```bash
trl dpo --config dpo_config.yaml
```
</hfoption>
</hfoptions>

## Getting the System Information

You can get the system information by running the following command:

```bash
trl env
```

This will print out the system information, including the GPU information, the CUDA version, the PyTorch version, the transformers version, the TRL version, and any optional dependencies that are installed.

```txt
Copy-paste the following information when reporting an issue:

- Platform: Linux-5.15.0-1048-aws-x86_64-with-glibc2.31
- Python version: 3.11.9
- PyTorch version: 2.4.1
- accelerator(s): NVIDIA H100 80GB HBM3
- Transformers version: 4.45.0.dev0
- Accelerate version: 0.34.2
- Accelerate config: 
  - compute_environment: LOCAL_MACHINE
  - distributed_type: DEEPSPEED
  - mixed_precision: no
  - use_cpu: False
  - debug: False
  - num_processes: 4
  - machine_rank: 0
  - num_machines: 1
  - rdzv_backend: static
  - same_network: True
  - main_training_function: main
  - enable_cpu_affinity: False
  - deepspeed_config: {'gradient_accumulation_steps': 4, 'offload_optimizer_device': 'none', 'offload_param_device': 'none', 'zero3_init_flag': False, 'zero_stage': 2}
  - downcast_bf16: no
  - tpu_use_cluster: False
  - tpu_use_sudo: False
  - tpu_env: []
- Datasets version: 3.0.0
- HF Hub version: 0.24.7
- TRL version: 0.12.0.dev0+acb4d70
- bitsandbytes version: 0.41.1
- DeepSpeed version: 0.15.1
- Diffusers version: 0.30.3
- Liger-Kernel version: 0.3.0
- LLM-Blender version: 0.0.2
- OpenAI version: 1.46.0
- PEFT version: 0.12.0
- vLLM version: not installed
```

This information is required when reporting an issue.