handson-ml/docker

Hands-on Machine Learning in Docker

This is the Docker configuration which allows you to run and tweak the book's notebooks without installing any dependencies on your machine!
OK, any except docker and docker-compose.

Prerequisites

Follow the instructions on Install Docker and Install Docker Compose for your environment if you haven't got docker and docker-compose already.

Some general knowledge about docker infrastructure might be useful (that's an interesting topic on its own) but is not strictly required to just run the notebooks.

Usage

Prepare the image (once)

The first option is to pull the image from Docker Hub (this will download over 6 GB of data):

$ docker pull ageron/handson-ml2
$ docker tag ageron/handson-ml2 handson-ml2

Alternatively, you can build the image yourself. This will be slower, but it will ensure the image is up to date, with the latest libraries. For this, assuming you already downloaded this project into the directory /path/to/project/handson-ml2:

$ cd /path/to/project/handson-ml2/docker
$ docker-compose build

This will take quite a while, but is only required once.

After the process is finished you have a handson-ml2 image, that will be the base for your experiments. You can confirm that by running the following command:

$ docker images
REPOSITORY        TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE
handson-ml2       latest              6c4dc2c7c516        2 minutes ago       6.49GB

Run the notebooks

Still assuming you already downloaded this project into the directory /path/to/project/handson-ml2, run the following commands to start the Jupyter server inside the container (it is also named handson-ml2, just like the image):

$ cd /path/to/project/handson-ml2/docker
$ docker-compose up

Next, just point your browser to the URL printed on the screen (or go to http://localhost:8888 if you enabled password authentication inside the jupyter_notebook_config.py file, before building the image) and you're ready to play with the book's code!

The server runs in the directory containing the notebooks, and the changes you make from the browser will be persisted there.

You can close the server just by pressing Ctrl-C in terminal window.

Using make (optional)

If you have make installed on your computer, you can use it as a thin layer to run docker-compose commands. For example, executing make rebuild will actually run docker-compose build --no-cache, which will rebuild the image without using the cache. This ensures that your image is based on the latest version of the continuumio/miniconda3 image which the handson-ml2 image is based on.

If you don't have make (and you don't want to install it), just examine the contents of Makefile to see which docker-compose commands you can run instead.

Run additional commands in the container

Run make exec (or docker-compose exec handson-ml2 bash) while the server is running to run an additional bash shell inside the handson-ml2 container. Now you're inside the environment prepared within the image.

One of the useful things that can be done there would be starting TensorBoard (for example with simple tb command, see bashrc file).

Another one may be comparing versions of the notebooks using the nbdiff command if you haven't got nbdime installed locally (it is way better than plain diff for notebooks). See Tools for diffing and merging of Jupyter notebooks for more details.

You can see changes you made relative to the version in git using git diff which is integrated with nbdiff.

You may also try nbd NOTEBOOK_NAME.ipynb command (custom, see bashrc file) to compare one of your notebooks with its checkpointed version.
To be precise, the output will tell you what modifications should be re-played on the manually saved version of the notebook (located in .ipynb_checkpoints subdirectory) to update it to the current i.e. auto-saved version (given as command's argument - located in working directory).