How to build Caffe2 from source

I followed these steps to build and use Caffe2 from source:

• If you have a GPU, install CUDA and cuDNN as described here.

• Install the package prerequisites:

$ sudo apt install build-essential cmake git libgoogle-glog-dev libprotobuf-dev protobuf-compiler python-dev python-pip libgflags2 libgtest-dev libiomp-dev libleveldb-dev liblmdb-dev libopencv-dev libopenmpi-dev libsnappy-dev openmpi-bin openmpi-doc python-pydot

• Install the required Python packages using PIP:

$ sudo pip install numpy protobuf flask graphviz hypothesis jupyter matplotlib pydot python-nvd3 pyyaml requests scikit-image scipy setuptools tornado

• Clone Caffe2 source code:

$ git clone git@github.com:caffe2/caffe2.git

• Caffe2 is under rapid deployment, so I find that the master branch may sometimes not compile. It is better to check the available release tags and checkout the latest release:

$ git tag
$ git co -b v_0_7_0 v0.7.0

• The install guide suggests running make to build. Note that this in turn creates a build directory, runs CMake from there and later runs make in a subshell. The child make running from inside a Makefile will not get the MAKEFLAGS of the parent make. So, you cannot make in parallel by using --jobs or -j settings. And believe me building Caffe2 without parallel make takes extremely long! So, I prefer doing the CMake and make myself:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make

• After Caffe2 is built, you need to install the Caffe2 headers, libraries and Python files to a different location. If you do not configure anything, CMake will try to install Caffe2 to /usr/local, which requires superuser privileges. I prefer installing Caffe2 to a local directory, say /home/joe/caffe2_deploy. To be able to to this:

$ cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/home/joe/caffe2_deploy ..
$ make install

• Add the library path to LD_LIBRARY_PATH:

$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/home/joe/caffe2_deploy/lib

• Add the install directory to PYTHONPATH to be able to use Caffe2 from Python:

$ export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/home/joe/caffe2_deploy

• Use Caffe2 and enjoy:

$ python -m caffe2.python.operator_test.relu_op_test

Tried with: Ubuntu 14.04