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Hopsworks is the Data-Intensive AI platform with a Feature Store for building complete end-to-end machine learning pipelines. This tutorial will show an overview of how to install and manage Python libraries in the platform. Hopsworks provides a Python environment per project that is shared among all the users in the project. All common installation alternatives are supported such as using the pip and conda package managers, in addition to libraries packaged in a .whl or .egg file and those that reside on a git repository. Furthermore, the service includes automatic conflict/dependency detection, upgrade notifications for platform libraries and easily accessible installations logs.
The Python ecosystem is huge and seemingly ever growing. In a similar fashion, the number of ways to install your favorite package also seems to increase. As such, a data analysis platform needs to support a great variety of these options.
The Hopsworks installation ships with a Miniconda environment that comes preinstalled with the most popular libraries you can find in a data scientists toolkit, including TensorFlow, PyTorch and scikit-learn. The environment may be managed using the Hopsworks Python service to install or libraries which may then be used in Jupyter or the Jobs service in the platform.
In this blog post we will describe how to install a python library, wherever it may reside, in the Hopsworks platform. As an example, this tutorial will demonstrate how to install the Hopsworks Feature Store client library, called hsfs. The library is Apache V2 licensed, available on github and published on PyPi.
To follow this tutorial you should have an Hopsworks instance running on You can register for free, without providing credit card information, and receive USD 4000 worth of free credits to get started. The only thing you need to do is to connect your cloud account.
The first step to get started with the platform and install libraries in the python environment is to create a project and then navigate to the Python service.
When a project is created, the python environment is also initialized for the project. An overview of all the libraries and their versions along with the package manager that was used to install them are listed under the Manage Environment tab.
The simplest alternative to install the hsfs library is to enter the name as is done below and click Install as is shown in the example. The installation itself can then be tracked under the Ongoing Operations tab and when the installation is finished the library appears under the Manage Environment tab.
If hsfs would also have been available on an Anaconda repo, which is currently not the case, we would need to specify the channel where it resides. Searching for libraries on Anaconda repos is accessed by setting Conda as the package location.
If a versioned installation is desired to get the hsfs version compatible with a certain Hopsworks installation, the search functionality shows all the versions that have been published to PyPi in a dropdown. Simply pick a version and press Install. The example found below demonstrates this.
Many popular Python libraries have a great variety of builds for different platforms, architectures and with different build flags enabled. As such it is also important to support directly installing a distribution. To install hsfs as a wheel requires that the .whl file was previously uploaded to a Dataset in the project. After that we need to select the Upload tab, which means that the library we want to install is contained in an uploaded file. Then click the Browse button to navigate in the file selector to the distribution file and click Install as the following example demonstrates.
Installing libraries one by one can be tedious and error prone, in that case it may be easier to use a requirements.txt file to define all the dependencies. This makes it easier to move your existing Python environment to Hopsworks, instead of having to install each library one by one.
The file may for example look like this.
This dependency list defines that version 2.2.7 of hsfs should be installed, along with version 2.9.0 of imageio and the latest available release for mahotas. The file needs to be uploaded to a dataset as in the previous example and then selected in the UI.
A great deal of python libraries are hosted on git repositories, this makes it especially handy to install a library during the development phase from a git repository. The source code for the hsfs package is as previously mentioned, hosted on a public github repository. Which means we only need to supply the URL to the repository and some optional query parameters. The subdirectory=python query parameter indicates that the setup.py file, which is needed to install the package, is in a subdirectory in the repository called python.
After each installation or uninstall of a library, the environment is analyzed to detect libraries that may not work properly. As hsfs depends on several libraries, it is important to analyze the environment and see if there are any dependency issues. For example, pandas is a dependency of hsfs and if uninstalled, an alert will appear that informs the user that the library is missing. In the following example pandas is uninstalled to demonstrate that.
When new releases are available for the hsfs library, a notification is shown to make it simple to upgrade to the latest version. Currently, only the hops and hsfs libraries are monitored for new releases as they are utility libraries used to interact with the platform services. By clicking the upgrade text, the library is upgraded to the recommended version automatically.
Speaking from experience, Python library installations can fail for a seemingly endless number of reasons. As such, to find the cause, it is crucial to be able to access the installation logs in a simple way to find a meaningful error. In the following example, an incorrect version of hsfs is being installed, and the cause of failure can be found a few seconds later in the logs.
Hopsworks is available both on AWS and Azure as a managed platform. Try it now for free.
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