How To Install TensorFlow on Debian 9 Stretch

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install TensorFlow on Debian 9. For those of you who didn’t know, TensorFlow is an end-to-end open-source machine learning platform used for machine learning and deep learning applications. It is developed by Google to do search ranking in its machine learning system.TensorFlow is created using the Python programming language, making it an easy-to-understand framework

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of TensorFlow on a Debian 9 (Stretch) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 9 (Stretch).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install TensorFlow on Debian 9

Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Installing Python 3 and venv.

Install Python and Python venv using the following command:

sudo apt install python3-venv

Step 3. Creating a Virtual Environment.

Create a new directory for the TensorFlow project and cd into it:

mkdir mytensorflow
cd mytensorflow

Once inside the directory, we run the following command to create the virtual environment:

python3 -m venv venv

To start using this virtual environment, you need to activate it by running the activate script:

source venv/bin/activate

Step 4. Installing TensorFlow on Debian.

Install the TensorFlow package:

pip install --upgrade tensorflow

To verify the installation use the following command which will print the TensorFlow version:

$ python -c 'import tensorflow as tf; print(tf.__version__)'
1.13.1

Congratulations! You have successfully installed TensorFlow. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing TensorFlow on your Debian 9 Stretch system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official TensorFlow website.