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 Ubuntu 20.04.
Installing TensorFlow on Ubuntu
By default Python 3.8 included with Ubuntu 20.04. Run below command to verify whether Python 3 is available on your system:
python3 -V
It should show below output:
Python 3.8.2
The venv environment module is included in the python3-venv package and it’s easy and recommended way to create a virtual environment.
Run the following command to install the python3-venv package:
sudo apt install python3-venv python3-dev
After completion of installation, you can create a virtual environment for our TensorFlow project.
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
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 Ubuntu 20.04. To know more about TensorFlow, visit the Get Started with TensorFlow page.
If you have any problem or feedback, please leave a comment below.