Installing TensorFlow for Go

TensorFlow provides APIs for use in Go programs. These APIs are particularly well-suited to loading models created in Python and executing them within a Go application. This guide explains how to install and set up the TensorFlow Go package.

WARNING: The TensorFlow Go API is not covered by the TensorFlow API stability guarantees.

Supported Platforms

You may install TensorFlow for Go on the following operating systems:

• Linux
• Mac OS X

Installation

TensorFlow for Go depends on the TensorFlow C library. Take the following steps to install this library and enable TensorFlow for Go:

1. Decide whether you will run TensorFlow for Go on CPU(s) only or with the help of GPU(s). To help you decide, read the section entitled "Determine which TensorFlow to install" in one of the following guides:

   • Installing TensorFlow on Linux
   • Installing TensorFlow on Mac OS

2. Download and extract the TensorFlow C library into /usr/local/lib by invoking the following shell commands:

   TF_TYPE="cpu" # Change to "gpu" for GPU support
   TARGET_DIRECTORY='/usr/local'
   curl -L \
     "https://storage.googleapis.com/tensorflow/libtensorflow/libtensorflow-${TF_TYPE}-$(go env GOOS)-x86_64-1.3.0-rc1.tar.gz" |
   sudo tar -C $TARGET_DIRECTORY -xz
   

   The tar command extracts the TensorFlow C library into the lib subdirectory of TARGET_DIRECTORY. For example, specifying /usr/local as TARGET_DIRECTORY causes tar to extract the TensorFlow C library into /usr/local/lib.

   If you'd prefer to extract the library into a different directory, adjust TARGET_DIRECTORY accordingly.

3. In Step 2, if you specified a system directory (for example, /usr/local) as the TARGET_DIRECTORY, then run ldconfig to configure the linker. For example:

   sudo ldconfig

   If you assigned a TARGET_DIRECTORY other than a system directory (for example, ~/mydir), then you must append the extraction directory (for example, ~/mydir/lib) to two environment variables as follows:

    export LIBRARY_PATH=$LIBRARY_PATH:~/mydir/lib # For both Linux and Mac OS X
   export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:~/mydir/lib # For Linux only
   export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH:~/mydir/lib # For Mac OS X only

4. Now that the TensorFlow C library is installed, invoke go get as follows to download the appropriate packages and their dependencies:

   go get github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/tensorflow/go

5. Invoke go test as follows to validate the TensorFlow for Go installation:

   go test github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/tensorflow/go

If go get or go test generate error messages, search (or post to) StackOverflow for possible solutions.

Hello World

After installing TensorFlow for Go, enter the following code into a file named hello_tf.go:

package main

import (
    tf "github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/tensorflow/go"
    "github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/tensorflow/go/op"
    "fmt"
)

func main() {
    // Construct a graph with an operation that produces a string constant.
    s := op.NewScope()
    c := op.Const(s, "Hello from TensorFlow version " + tf.Version())
    graph, err := s.Finalize()
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }

    // Execute the graph in a session.
    sess, err := tf.NewSession(graph, nil)
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }
    output, err := sess.Run(nil, []tf.Output{c}, nil)
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }
    fmt.Println(output[0].Value())
}

For a more advanced example of TensorFlow in Go, look at the example in the API documentation, which uses a pre-trained TensorFlow model to label contents of an image.

Running

Run hello_tf.go by invoking the following command:

go run hello_tf.go
Hello from TensorFlow version number

The program might also generate multiple warning messages of the following form, which you can ignore:

W tensorflow/core/platform/cpu_feature_guard.cc:45] The TensorFlow library
wasn't compiled to use *Type* instructions, but these are available on your
machine and could speed up CPU computations.

Building from source code

TensorFlow is open-source. You may build TensorFlow for Go from the TensorFlow source code by following the instructions in a separate document.