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Installing Tensorflow and Keras on Windows

·267 words·2 mins
Rian Finnegan
Author
Rian Finnegan
Welcome to my personal website where I share thoughts on technology, software development, and various other topics.

Installing Tensorflow was once challenging, bordering on impossible. Now… not so much.

Install Anaconda
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Anaconda is a data science ecosystem, giving users access to all sorts of toolkits and frameworks. Download the Anaconda installer for Windows (it’s ~500MB) and install. See, that was easy!

Install C++ Build Tools
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If you don’t already have them installed, you’ll need to download and install the Visual C++ Build Tools.

TF & Keras
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Anaconda provides a simple tool for installing TF in a virtual environment. Open up a terminal prompt and type conda create -n tensorflow python=3.5 . This will create a virtual environment for called tensorflow that you’ll use to encapsulate all your tensorflow libraries!

Conda Forge is a community led source for conda packages. It provides a simple way to install the packages we’re looking for!

Activate your environment using activate tensorflow.

Now, we’re going to install tf and keras into our virtual anaconda environment using packages from Conda Forge. With your tensorflow env active: conda install -c conda-forge keras tensorflow

Now use conda list to see all packages installed in your env.

an image

Look at that! Tensorflow and Keras are both installed!

Test
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Copy the following code into a new file called kerastest.py

from keras.models import Sequential
from keras.layers import Dense, Dropout, Activation
from keras.optimizers import SGD
model = Sequential()
model.add(Dense(64, input_dim=20, init='uniform'))
model.add(Activation('tanh'))
model.add(Dropout(0.5))
model.add(Dense(64, init='uniform'))
model.add(Activation('tanh'))
model.add(Dropout(0.5))
model.add(Dense(10, init='uniform'))
model.add(Activation('softmax'))
sgd = SGD(lr=0.1, decay=1e-6, momentum=0.9, nesterov=True)
model.compile(loss='categorical_crossentropy',
          optimizer=sgd,
          metrics=['accuracy'])
print('done')

If it works, then your environment is ready to go.

Get Learning!

More Info
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Conda Environments

Installing TF on Windows

Installing Keras