Is Tensorflow compatible with a Windows workflow?

Question

I haven't seen anything about Windows compatibility -- is this on the way or currently available somewhere if I put forth some effort? (I have a Mac and an Ubuntu box but the Windows machine is the one with the discrete graphics card that I currently use with theano).

Answer 1

As @mrry suggested, it is easier to set up TensorFlow with Docker. Here's how I managed to set it up as well as getting iPython Notebook up and running in my Docker environment (I find it really convenient to use iPython Notebook for all testing purposes as well as documenting my experiments).

I assume that you have installed both docker and boot2docker for Windows here.

First, run TensorFlow docker on daemon and set it up so Jupyter server (iPython Notebook) can be accessed from your main Windows system's browser:

docker run -dit -v /c/Users/User/:/media/disk -p 8888:8888 b.gcr.io/tensorflow/tensorflow:latest

Replace /c/Users/User/ with a path in your host you wish to mount i.e. where you can keep your iPython files. I don't know how to set it to other drives than C:, let me know if you do. /media/disk is the location in your TensorFlow docker where your host path's mounted against.

-p 8888:8888 basically means "map port 8888 in docker to 8888 in host directory". You can change the second part to other ports if you wish.

When you got it running, you can access it by running the following code:

docker exec -ti [docker-id] bash

Where [docker-id] can be found by running:

docker ps

To start your ipython notebook server from within TensorFlow's docker, run the following command:

ipython notebook --ip='*'

To allow ipython server to listen to all ip so your app may be accessible from host machine.

Instead of viewing your app in http://localhost:8888, you can only view it in http://[boot2docker-ip]:8888. To find boot2docker-ip run this in your terminal (not boot2docker terminal):

boot2docker ip

Answer 2

Updated 11/28/2016: Today we released the first release candidate of TensorFlow 0.12, which includes support for Windows. You can install the Python bindings using the following command in a Python shell:

C:\> pip install tensorflow

...or, if you want GPU support:

C:\> pip install tensorflow-gpu

You can also build TensorFlow yourself using Microsoft Visual C++ and NVCC (for the CUDA parts). The easiest way to build on Windows is currently to use the CMake build, and we will soon provide support for Bazel on Windows.

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Previous answer: We haven't tried to build TensorFlow on Windows so far: the only supported platforms are Linux (Ubuntu) and Mac OS X, and we've only built binaries for those platforms.

For now, on Windows, the easiest way to get started with TensorFlow would be to use Docker: http://tensorflow.org/get_started/os_setup.md#docker-based_installation

It should become easier to add Windows support when Bazel (the build system we are using) adds support for building on Windows, which is on the roadmap for Bazel 0.3. You can see the full Bazel roadmap here.

In the meantime, you can follow issue 17 on the TensorFlow GitHub page.

Answer 3

Another way to run it on Windows is to install for example Vmware (a free version if you are not using it commercially), install Ubuntu Linux into that and then install TensorFlow using the Linux instructions. That is what I have been doing, it works well.