Installation

Lasagne has a couple of prerequisites that need to be installed first, but it is not very picky about versions. The single exception is Theano: Due to its tight coupling to Theano, you will have to install a recent version of Theano (usually more recent than the latest official release!) fitting the version of Lasagne you choose to install.

Most of the instructions below assume you are running a Linux or Mac system, but are otherwise very generic. For detailed step-by-step instructions for specific platforms including Windows, check our From Zero to Lasagne guides.

If you run into any trouble, please check the Theano installation instructions which cover installing the prerequisites for a range of operating systems, or ask for help on our mailing list.

Prerequisites

Python + pip

Lasagne currently requires Python 2.7 or 3.4 to run. Please install Python via the package manager of your operating system if it is not included already.

Python includes pip for installing additional modules that are not shipped with your operating system, or shipped in an old version, and we will make use of it below. We recommend installing these modules into your home directory via --user, or into a virtual environment via virtualenv.

C compiler

Theano requires a working C compiler, and numpy/scipy require a compiler as well if you install them via pip. On Linux, the default compiler is usually gcc, and on Mac OS, it’s clang. Again, please install them via the package manager of your operating system.

numpy/scipy + BLAS

Lasagne requires numpy of version 1.6.2 or above, and Theano also requires scipy 0.11 or above. Numpy/scipy rely on a BLAS library to provide fast linear algebra routines. They will work fine without one, but a lot slower, so it is worth getting this right (but this is less important if you plan to use a GPU).

If you install numpy and scipy via your operating system’s package manager, they should link to the BLAS library installed in your system. If you install numpy and scipy via pip install numpy and pip install scipy, make sure to have development headers for your BLAS library installed (e.g., the libopenblas-dev package on Debian/Ubuntu) while running the installation command. Please refer to the numpy/scipy build instructions if in doubt.

Theano

The version to install depends on the Lasagne version you choose, so this will be handled below.

Stable Lasagne release

Lasagne 0.1 requires a more recent version of Theano than the one available on PyPI. To install a version that is known to work, run the following command:

pip install -r https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Lasagne/Lasagne/v0.1/requirements.txt

Warning

An even more recent version of Theano will often work as well, but at the time of writing, a simple pip install Theano will give you a version that is too old.

To install release 0.1 of Lasagne from PyPI, run the following command:

pip install Lasagne==0.1

If you do not use virtualenv, add --user to both commands to install into your home directory instead. To upgrade from an earlier installation, add --upgrade.

Bleeding-edge version

The latest development version of Lasagne usually works fine with the latest development version of Theano. To install both, run the following commands:

pip install --upgrade https://github.com/Theano/Theano/archive/master.zip
pip install --upgrade https://github.com/Lasagne/Lasagne/archive/master.zip

Again, add --user if you want to install to your home directory instead.

Development installation

Alternatively, you can install Lasagne (and optionally Theano) from source, in a way that any changes to your local copy of the source tree take effect without requiring a reinstall. This is often referred to as editable or development mode. Firstly, you will need to obtain a copy of the source tree:

git clone https://github.com/Lasagne/Lasagne.git

It will be cloned to a subdirectory called Lasagne. Make sure to place it in some permanent location, as for an editable installation, Python will import the module directly from this directory and not copy over the files. Enter the directory and install the known good version of Theano:

cd Lasagne
pip install -r requirements.txt

Alternatively, install the bleeding-edge version of Theano as described in the previous section.

To install the Lasagne package itself, in editable mode, run:

pip install --editable .

As always, add --user to install it to your home directory instead.

Optional: If you plan to contribute to Lasagne, you will need to fork the Lasagne repository on GitHub. This will create a repository under your user account. Update your local clone to refer to the official repository as upstream, and your personal fork as origin:

git remote rename origin upstream
git remote add origin https://github.com/<your-github-name>/Lasagne.git

If you set up an SSH key, use the SSH clone URL instead: git@github.com:<your-github-name>/Lasagne.git.

You can now use this installation to develop features and send us pull requests on GitHub, see Development!

GPU support

Thanks to Theano, Lasagne transparently supports training your networks on a GPU, which may be 10 to 50 times faster than training them on a CPU. Currently, this requires an NVIDIA GPU with CUDA support, and some additional software for Theano to use it.

CUDA

Install the latest CUDA Toolkit and possibly the corresponding driver available from NVIDIA: https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads

Closely follow the Getting Started Guide linked underneath the download table to be sure you don’t mess up your system by installing conflicting drivers.

After installation, make sure /usr/local/cuda/bin is in your PATH, so nvcc --version works. Also make sure /usr/local/cuda/lib64 is in your LD_LIBRARY_PATH, so the toolkit libraries can be found.

Theano

If CUDA is set up correctly, the following should print some information on your GPU (the first CUDA-capable GPU in your system if you have multiple ones):

THEANO_FLAGS=device=gpu python -c "import theano; print(theano.sandbox.cuda.device_properties(0))"

To configure Theano to use the GPU by default, create a file .theanorc directly in your home directory, with the following contents:

[global]
floatX = float32
device = gpu

Optionally add allow_gc = False for some extra performance at the expense of (sometimes substantially) higher GPU memory usage.

If you run into problems, please check Theano’s instructions for Using the GPU.

cuDNN

NVIDIA provides a library for common neural network operations that especially speeds up Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Again, it can be obtained from NVIDIA (after registering as a developer): https://developer.nvidia.com/cudnn

Note that it requires a reasonably modern GPU with Compute Capability 3.0 or higher; see NVIDIA’s list of CUDA GPUs.

To install it, copy the *.h files to /usr/local/cuda/include and the lib* files to /usr/local/cuda/lib64.

To check whether it is found by Theano, run the following command:

python -c "from theano.sandbox.cuda.dnn import dnn_available as d; print(d() or d.msg)"

It will print True if everything is fine, or an error message otherwise. There are no additional steps required for Theano to make use of cuDNN.

Docker

Instead of manually installing Theano and Lasagne on your machines as described above, you may want to use a pre-made Docker image: Lasagne Docker (CPU) or Lasagne Docker (CUDA). These are updated on a weekly basis with bleeding-edge builds of Theano and Lasagne. Examples of running bash in a Docker container are as follows:

sudo docker run -it kaixhin/lasagne
sudo nvidia-docker run -it kaixhin/cuda-lasagne:7.0

For a guide to Docker, see the official docs. CUDA support requires NVIDIA Docker. For more details on how to use the Lasagne Docker images, consult the source project.