Install TensorFlow For Python3

I sat down tonight after having set myself the goal of installing Tensorflow, thinking it might take me a few hours. It's actually its dead easy, so I wanted to post this tutorial to show just how easy it is. The docs list a million-and-one ways to install the tool but this just covers setting up with native Python3 on Ubuntu 16.04.

Steps

CPU-only Installation

Run the following commands/script to get tensorflow (CPU only) installed on your Ubuntu 16.04 server.

# Install necessary python packages.
sudo apt-get install python3-pip python3-dev -y

# Upgrade pipo this is 
pip3 install --upgrade pip

# Install tensorflow (cpu only)
pip3 install tensorflow

GPU Installation

If you want to use an NVIDIA GPU for tensorflow then run this instead:

# Install necessary python packages.
sudo apt-get install python3-pip python3-dev -y

# Upgrade pip
pip3 install --upgrade pip

# Install tensorflow with GPU support
pip3 install tensorflow-gpu

Testing Installation Successful

That seemed a little too easy, so let's just write a small script that uses the tensorflow library to test that we have installed it correctly:

#!/usr/bin/python3
import tensorflow as tf
hello = tf.constant("Hello, TensorFlow!")
sess = tf.Session()
print(sess.run(hello))

If you execute it you should get the following output :

b'Hello, TensorFlow!'

Conclusion

Now you have tensorflow installed. I will post more tutorials soon on using Tensorflow, but for now you can read the Python API docs.

Uninstall

If you ever need to uninstall tensorflow just run:

sudo pip3 uninstall tensorflow

References

• Tensorflow Docs - Installing TensorFlow on Ubuntu