Installing tensorflow

This is another quick post on installation difficulties and how to alleviate them. We’re looking at TensorFlow as an ML solution for many of the things we are exploring with vg. It’s awesome that it’s free and open-source, and the community is growing by the day. However, installation isn’t always a breeze.

I first tried to install tensorflow using pip a la Google’s instructions (I already had python-dev and pip on my system):

sudo pip install --upgrade https://storage.googleapis.com/tensorflow/linux/cpu/tensorflow-0.7.0-py2-none-linux_x86_64.whl

This fails with an error saying that the wheel isn’t supported on my platform. There’s a simple workaround for this on StackOverflow, but it still wouldn’t work for me. After updating pip, I tried the local install method reference in the TensorFlow docs:

				sudo pip install https://storage.googleapis.com/tensorflow/linux/cpu/tensorflow-0.7.0-py2-none-linux_x86_64.whl```
                
This seemed to work, but then when I cracked open python and tried `import tensorflow as tf`, I got [another error](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/282), even though I'm on Ubuntu 14.04 and not Mac OS.

The solution was to update my protobuf to the bleeding edge.
```git clone --recursive https://github.com/google/protobuf.git  
	cd protobuf/  
    ./autogen.sh  
    ./configure --prefix=/usr  
    make -j 4  
    make check ## All tests passed here  
    sudo make install  
    sudo ldconfig ## Places new libs on LD_LIBRARY_PATH```
    
At this point, I had installed the C++ version of protobuf and could compile things with `protoc`, but I still needed the `python` bindings.

```## Still in protobuf dir  
	cd python/  
    python setup.py build    
    python setup.py test ## Fails ~ 2% of all tests  
    python setup.py install```
    
And only then I could test TensorFlow and run the examples. If you're installing locally, all the instructions should be about the same but you'll need to use `./configure --prefix=/your/install/dir` and ensure that you add the relevant directories to the `LD_LIBRARY_PATH` and `LD_INCLUDE_PATH`. Hopefully the next post is on doing something neat with TensorFlow now that I've got it installed!