TensorFlow is an open-source and free software library for machine learning developed by Google. It can be installed system-wide, in a Python virtual environment, as a Docker container, or with Anaconda. Also, large companies like Airbus, Intel, Twitter, PayPal, and Lenovo using TensorFlow. In this tutorial we will show you how to install TensorFlow in a Python virtual environment on CentOS 8.
Install TensorFlow on CentOS
Perform the following steps to install TensorFlow on CentOS:
Step 1 – Installing Python 3 and venv
By default Python is not installed on CentOS 8 system. Run the following command to install Python 3 on CentOS 8 machine:
sudo dnf install python3
It will install Python 3 and pip. To run Python 3, you need to type python3 explicitly, and to run pip type pip3.
The recommended way to create a virtual environment is to use the venv module.
Step 2 – Creating Virtual Environment
First, you have to navigate to the directory where you would like to store your Python 3 virtual environments. Make sure the user has read and write permissions of that directory.
Create a new directory for the TensorFlow project and cd into it:
mkdir tensorflow_demo
cd tensorflow_demo
To create the virtual environment, run the following command:
python3 -m venv venv
The above command will create a directory named venv and it contains a clone of the Python binary, the standard Python library, and other supporting files, the Pip package manager.
To activate it run the activate script:
source venv/bin/activate
Once activated, the virtual environment’s bin directory will be added at the beginning of the system $PATH variable . Also, the shell’s prompt will change, and it will show the name of the virtual environment you’re currently in. In this example, that is (venv).
The pip version 19 or higher is required for TensorFlow installation. To upgrade pip to the latest version run the following command:
pip install --upgrade pip
Step 3 – Installing TensorFlow
Now at this stage, the virtual environment is activate and we can install the TensorFlow package.
pip install --upgrade tensorflow
That’s it! TensorFlow installation is complete successfully and you can start using it.
Verify the installation by typing:
python -c 'import tensorflow as tf; print(tf.__version__)'
It should show the latest stable version of TensorFlow, at the time of writing this article the latest version is 2.2.0:
2.2.0
Conclusion
You have successfully learned how to install TensorFlow inside a virtual environment on CentOS 8. To know more about TensorFlow, visit the Get Started with TensorFlow page.
If you have any problem or feedback, please leave a comment below.