How to build Caffe

Building Caffe from source is easy. There are two options provided: using a Makefile or using CMake.

Required packages

• Download or clone the source code of Caffe from here.

• Not surprisingly, you will need a GPU, a graphics driver that can work with that GPU and an installation of CUDA.

• Other than that, you will need to install these packages:

$ sudo apt install libboost-all-dev libprotobuf-dev libleveldb-dev libsnappy-dev libopencv-dev libhdf5-serial-dev protobuf-compiler libgflags-dev libgoogle-glog-dev liblmdb-dev

• For BLAS on CPU, the best performance comes from installing Intel’s MKL libraries. If you do not have that, you can install either ATLAS or OpenBLAS:

$ sudo apt install libatlas-base-dev
$ sudo apt install libopenblas-dev

• To build the Python interface to Caffe, which is highly recommended, make sure these packages are installed:

$ sudo apt install libboost-python-dev python-skimage python-protobuf

• If you do not have one or more of the above Python-related packages, you might see these errors:

The dependency target "pycaffe" of target "pytest" does not exist.

ImportError: No module named skimage.io

ImportError: No module named google.protobuf.internal

Build using CMake

Just follow the usual steps for CMake:

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

To build and run the 2000+ unittests, which can take quite a while to finish:

$ make runtest

Finally to build the Python interface to Caffe:

$ make pycaffe
$ make install

By default, the install directory will be a subdirectory inside the build directory. Add this build/install/python path to PYTHONPATH environment variable before you import caffe in Python.

Build using Make

On one system, I found that using Makefile was easier, since CMake was erroneously complaining about -lpthreads (which is a Clang library, not a GCC library). Copy the Makefile config file, open it in an editor and check whether all the paths are set correctly:

$ cp Makefile.config.example Makefile.config
$ vim Makefile.config
$ make

Build MatCaffe

Building support for MATLAB to use Caffe takes a few more steps:

• In Makefile.config, set the MATLAB_DIR to the path that contains bin/mex. On my computer, this was the path /usr/local/MATLAB/R2014a.

• Compiling the MATLAB wrapper gave an error about C++11 on my Ubuntu 14.04 due to the older GCC compilers. So, I had to add -std=c++11 to the CXXFLAGS variable in Makefile as shown here.

• Finally, compiling MatCaffe is easy:

$ make all matcaffe