How To Install TensorFlow on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install TensorFlow on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. 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 Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver).
• 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 Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing Python 3 and venv.

Run the commands below to install Python and Python venv:

sudo apt install python3 python3-pip python3-venv

To verify what version of Python is installed, run the commands below:

python3 -V

Step 3. Creating a Virtual Environment.

Now, we create a new directory for the TensorFlow project and navigate into it:

mkdir my_tensorflow
cd my_tensorflow

Once inside the directory, 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 Ubuntu.

Now that the virtual environment is activated, it’s time to 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__)'

Congratulations! You have successfully installed TensorFlow. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing TensorFlow on Ubuntu 18.04 systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official TensorFlow website.