Installation instructions¶

By now you should know that Bob is made of several Packages. There is no single package that installs all Bob packages because that would just take too much space. Follow the instruction below to install any Bob package.

We offer conda and pip installations of Bob for Linux and MacOS 64-bit operating systems (Most packages support arm 64-bit on MacOS too). Follow the guide below to learn to install any Bob package. Bob does not work on Windows.

Install mamba (mambaforge is preferred) or conda (miniforge is preferred) and get familiar with it. The instructions below use mamba because it’s faster than conda, but you may replace it by conda.

Make sure you have an up-to-date conda installation (conda 4.4 and above is needed) with the correct configuration by running the commands below:

# install mamba if you don't yet have it installed.
# mamba must be installed in your base environment.
$ conda install -n base -c conda-forge mamba
$ mamba update -n base -c conda-forge conda mamba
$ conda config --set show_channel_urls True

Create an environment with the specific Bob packages that you need. For example if you want to install bob.io.base, bob.bio.face, and pytorch:

$ mamba create --name bob_env1 --override-channels \
  -c https://www.idiap.ch/software/bob/conda \
  -c conda-forge \
  python=3 bob.io.base bob.bio.face pytorch

Then activate the environment and configure its channels to make sure the channel list is correct in the future as well:

$ conda activate bob_env1
$ conda config --env --add channels conda-forge
$ conda config --env --add channels https://www.idiap.ch/software/bob/conda

If you decide to install more packages in the future, just conda install them:
```
$ conda activate bob_env1
$ mamba install bob.bio.video ...
```
Alternatively, you can use pip to install the packages but we don’t test our pip packages:

$ conda activate bob_env1
$ pip install bob.bio.face ...

For a comprehensive list of packages that are either part of Bob or use Bob, please visit Packages.

Warning

Be aware that if you use packages from our channel and other channels (especially defaults) in one environment, you may end up with a broken envrionment. We can only guarantee that the packages in our channel are compatible with the conda-forge channel.

Note

Bob does not work on Windows and hence no conda packages are available for it. It will not work even if you install it from source. If you are an experienced user and manage to make Bob work on Windows, please let us know through our mailing list.

Note

Bob has been reported to run on arm processors (e.g. Raspberry Pi) but is not installable with conda. Please see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50803148 for installations on how to install Bob from source.

Note

If you cannot install a Bob package, you might be trying to install an old package. Please see Installing older versions of Bob for instructions on how to install old versions of Bob.

Developing Bob packages¶

Use bob.devtools if you want to develop Bob packages or create a new package. DO NOT modify (including adding extra files) the source code of Bob packages in your Conda environments. Typically, Bob packages can be extended without modifying the original package. So you may want to put your new code in a new package instead of modifying the original package.

Warning

Conda uses hard links to create new environments from a cache folder. Editing a file in one of the environments will edit that file in ALL of your environments. The only safe way to recover from this is to delete your Conda installation completely and installing everything again from scratch.

Installing older versions of Bob¶

Since Bob 4, you can easily select the Bob version that you want to install using conda. For example:

$ mamba create -n old_bob_env \
--no-channel-priority \
-c https://www.idiap.ch/software/bob/conda \
-c defaults \
-c https://www.idiap.ch/software/bob/conda/label/archive \
bob=4.0.0 bob.bio.face

will install the version of bob.bio.face that was associated with the Bob 4.0.0 release.

Note

Bob 9 and earlier used the defaults channel as base, for Bob 10 and later replace defaults with conda-forge in the instructions above.

Note

If you install the bob conda package, you may need to change your channel list to:

$ conda activate <bob-env-name>
$ conda config --env --add channels https://www.idiap.ch/software/bob/conda/label/archive
$ conda config --env --add channels defaults
$ conda config --env --add channels https://www.idiap.ch/software/bob/conda

Bob packages that were released before Bob 4 are not easily installable. Here, we provide conda environment files (Linux 64-bit only) that will install all Bob packages associated with an older release of Bob:

Bob Version	Environment Files
2.6.2	`envs/v262py27.yaml`, `envs/v262py35.yaml`
2.7.0	`envs/v270py27.yaml`, `envs/v270py35.yaml`
3.0.0	`envs/v300py27.yaml`, `envs/v300py36.yaml`

To install them, download one of the files above and run:

$ mamba env create --file v300py36.yaml

Details (advanced users)¶

Since Bob 4, the bob conda package is just a meta package that pins all packages to a specific version. Installing bob will not install anything; it will just impose pinnings in your environment. Normally, installations of Bob packages should work without installing bob itself. For example, running:

$ mamba create --name env_name --override-channels \
  -c https://www.idiap.ch/software/bob/conda -c conda-forge \
  bob.<package-name>

should always create a working environment. If it doesn’t, please let us know.