Python

Installing

Windows

Windows has wheels deployed to pypi for Python 3.6 (64-bit) and Python 3.7 (64-bit). Simply run pip install vowpalwabbit

OSX

1. Clone repo and Install dependencies
2. python setup.py install

Linux

The commands listed below will be using apt, replace this for the package manager used by your preferred flavor.

1. sudo apt update
2. sudo apt install libboost-dev libboost-program-options-dev libboost-system-dev libboost-thread-dev libboost-math-dev libboost-test-dev libboost-python-dev zlib1g-dev cmake python3 python3-pip
3. pip3 install vowpalwabbit

Troubleshooting

Windows

1. If pip install vowpalwabbit fails, ensure you are using the 64-bit version of Python 3.6 or 3.7 (The default download bitness for Windows is 32-bit)

2. If you need to build VowpalWabbit from source on Windows, use the following instructions

   1. Install vcpkg
   2. Install dependencies with vcpkg
      • Python 3.6 is built against commit aa095559
      • Python 3.7 is built against commit 8c3e093

   vcpkg --triplet x64-windows install zlib boost-system boost-program-options boost-test boost-align boost-foreach boost-python boost-math boost-thread python3

   3. cd <repo_root>
   4. python setup.py --vcpkg-root C:\path\to\vcpkg install
      • Where C:\path\to\vcpkg is the root directory of where you cloned vcpkg

OSX

There are several known issues regarding the VowpalWabbit installation for OSX.

1. Building and installing VowpalWabbit with Anaconda will crash on OSX 10.14 or later. See this issue for details
   • Uninstall Anaconda before attempting to install VowpalWabbit
2. CMake can't find Boost
   • Ensure the required Boost libraries are installed
   • If your Boost version is 1.70 or earlier, install using the command python setup.py --enable-boost-cmake install