My first job out of university was at a startup doing natural language processing (NLP). Recently I’ve been rekindling my interest in machine learning, and have been playing with the Tensorflow library from Google. I work on a Mac, but at home I’m switching between a Mac and a PC - and ideally I’d like things to just work on whatever machine I’m on. The Tensorflow setup guide says it requires Python 3.5 for Windows, but I’m using Python 2.7 on my Mac and would like to be able to use files across platforms.

Here’s a quick intro to getting set up with Tensorflow for Python 2.7 on Windows (using the recently released Bash on Windows).

Step 1 - Install Bash for Windows

This is pretty trivial. Just follow the instructions. I installed this on a Windows 10 64 bit machine with no problems.

Step 2 - Install Tensorflow

Now you have a bash shell (which comes with Python 2.7.4), we have to intall & upgrade pip (Tensorflow requires pip 8.1 or later):

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sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo pip install --ugprade pip
source ~/.bashrc
sudo pip install tensorflow

You can test that everything worked by opening up a Python interpreter (ie, just type python and hit enter) then importing Tensorflow:

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import tensorflow as tf

If you get no output, everything worked! exit() that and carry on.

Step 3 - Usage

If you’d like to edit your files in the shell, you’re basically good to go - though you’ll need to install git.

However if you’d like to use a nice GUI editor (such as Github’s Atom) you have to beware. There’s a blog post which is very explicit that you must not change Linux files from Windows. Instead we go the other way, and access the Windows filesystem from the shell. This lets us edit our files in an editor while in a Windows environment but then run our changes from our bash shell (which we just set up with Tensorflow).

The Windows filesystem is located under /mnt/c (or other drive letter), but if things are stored in your user directory then the paths can get a bit long. So first (this is optional) I like to add a shortcut to my working directory so it’s easily accessible by adding the following to my ~/.profile file:

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export TFSCRATCH=/mnt/c/Users/Adam/SomeDirectory

You’ll need to source ~/.profile, then you can just cd $TFSCRATCH whenever you want to get to your working directory.

If you’re using Atom (like I am) there’s a handy included extension called Line Ending Selector - it allows you to specify which line endings you’d like to use. Swap it to LF when editing your Python files.

Now, running code is as you’d expect from a bash shell. Here I run the basic MNIST sample from Google:

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adam@ADAM-PC:~$ cd $TFSCRATCH
adam@ADAM-PC:/mnt/c/Users/Adam/...$ python mnist_basic_google.py
Successfully downloaded train-images-idx3-ubyte.gz 9912422 bytes.
Extracting /tmp/tensorflow/mnist/input_data/train-images-idx3-ubyte.gz
Successfully downloaded train-labels-idx1-ubyte.gz 28881 bytes.
Extracting /tmp/tensorflow/mnist/input_data/train-labels-idx1-ubyte.gz
Successfully downloaded t10k-images-idx3-ubyte.gz 1648877 bytes.
Extracting /tmp/tensorflow/mnist/input_data/t10k-images-idx3-ubyte.gz
Successfully downloaded t10k-labels-idx1-ubyte.gz 4542 bytes.
Extracting /tmp/tensorflow/mnist/input_data/t10k-labels-idx1-ubyte.gz
0.9174

So; edit in Windows, run in bash. Easy.