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Installation Guide

Automatic Installation

To install MXNet.jl, simply type

Pkg.add("MXNet")

In the Julia REPL. Or to use the latest git version of MXNet.jl, use the following command instead

Pkg.checkout("MXNet")

MXNet.jl is built on top of libmxnet. Upon installation, Julia will try to automatically download and build libmxnet.

There are several environment variables that change this behaviour.

  • MXNET_HOME: If you already have a pre-installed version of mxnet you can use MXNET_HOME to point the build-process in the right direction.
  • CUDA_HOME: If the automatic cuda detection fails you can also set CUDA_HOME to override the process.
  • MXNET_COMMIT: To control which version of libmxnet will be compiled, you can use theMXNET_COMMIT variable to point to either a version tag (e.g. v0.10.0), a branch name (e.g. master) or a specific commit hash (e.g. a0b1c2d3).
  • ADD_CFLAGS: Additional C flags. For instance, if you need to point non-standard include directory, please set it as ENV["ADD_CFLAGS"] = "-I'/path/to/include/dir'".
  • ADD_LDFLAGS: Additional linker flags.

The libmxnet source is downloaded to Pkg.dir("MXNet", "deps", "src", "mxnet"). The automatic build is using default configurations, with OpenCV disabled. If the compilation failed due to unresolved dependency, or if you want to customize the build, you can compile and install libmxnet manually. Please see below for more details.

Manual Compilation

It is possible to compile libmxnet separately and point MXNet.jl to a existing library in case automatic compilation fails due to unresolved dependencies in an non-standard environment; Or when one want to work with a separate, maybe customized libmxnet.

To build libmxnet, please refer to the installation guide of libmxnet. After successfully installing libmxnet, set the MXNET_HOME environment variable to the location of libmxnet. In other words, the compiled libmxnet.so should be found in $MXNET_HOME/lib.

note

The constant MXNET_HOME is pre-compiled in MXNet.jl package cache. If you updated the environment variable after installing MXNet.jl, make sure to update the pre-compilation cache by Base.compilecache("MXNet").

When the MXNET_HOME environment variable is detected and the corresponding libmxnet.so could be loaded successfully, MXNet.jl will skip automatic building during installation and use the specified libmxnet instead.

Basically, MXNet.jl will search libmxnet.so or libmxnet.dll in the following paths (and in that order):

  • $MXNET_HOME/lib: customized libmxnet builds
  • Pkg.dir("MXNet", "deps", "usr", "lib"): automatic builds
  • Any system wide library search path

Note that MXNet.jl can not load libmxnet.so even if it is on one of the paths above in case a library it depends upon is missing from the LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Thus, if you are going to compile to add CUDA, the path to the CUDA libraries will have to be added to LD_LIBRARY_PATH.