Modal

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when:

• Deploy or serve AI/ML models in the cloud
• Run GPU-accelerated computations (training, inference, fine-tuning)
• Create serverless web APIs or endpoints
• Scale batch processing jobs in parallel
• Schedule recurring tasks (data pipelines, retraining, scraping)
• Need persistent cloud storage for model weights or datasets
• Want to run code in custom container environments
• Build job queues or async task processing systems

Authenticate

Prefer existing credentials before creating new ones:

1. Check whether MODAL_TOKEN_ID and MODAL_TOKEN_SECRET are already present in the current environment.
2. If not, check for those values in a local .env file and load them if appropriate for the workflow.
3. Only fall back to interactive modal setup or generating fresh tokens if neither source already provides credentials.

This opens a browser for authentication. For CI/CD or headless environments, use environment variables:

If tokens are not already available in the environment or .env, generate them at https://modal.com/settings

Modal offers a free tier with $30/month in credits.

Reference: See references/getting-started.md for detailed setup and first app walkthrough.

App and Functions

A Modal App groups related functions. Functions decorated with @app.function() run remotely in the cloud:

Run with modal run script.py. Deploy with modal deploy script.py.

Reference: See references/functions.md for lifecycle hooks, classes, .map(), .spawn(), and more.