11/11/2024, 13:51 Introduction - Hugging Face NLP Course
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Introduction
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Introduction
Welcome to the Hugging Face course! This introduction will
guide you through setting up a working environment. If you’re
just starting the course, we recommend you first take a look at
Chapter 1, then come back and set up your environment so
you can try the code yourself.
All the libraries that we’ll be using in this course are available
as Python packages, so here we’ll show you how to set up a
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Python environment and install the specific libraries you’ll
need.
We’ll cover two ways of setting up your working environment,
using a Colab notebook or a Python virtual environment. Feel
free to choose the one that resonates with you the most. For
beginners, we strongly recommend that you get started by
using a Colab notebook.
Note that we will not be covering the Windows system. If
you’re running on Windows, we recommend following along
using a Colab notebook. If you’re using a Linux distribution or
macOS, you can use either approach described here.
Most of the course relies on you having a Hugging Face
account. We recommend creating one now: create an account.
Using a Google Colab notebook
Using a Colab notebook is the simplest possible setup; boot
up a notebook in your browser and get straight to coding!
If you’re not familiar with Colab, we recommend you start by
following the introduction. Colab allows you to use some
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accelerating hardware, like GPUs or TPUs, and it is free for
smaller workloads.
Once you’re comfortable moving around in Colab, create a
new notebook and get started with the setup:
The next step is to install the libraries that we’ll be using in this
course. We’ll use pip for the installation, which is the package
manager for Python. In notebooks, you can run system
commands by preceding them with the ! character, so you
can install the 🤗 Transformers library as follows:
!pip install transformers
You can make sure the package was correctly installed by
importing it within your Python runtime:
import transformers
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This installs a very light version of 🤗 Transformers. In
particular, no specific machine learning frameworks (like
PyTorch or TensorFlow) are installed. Since we’ll be using a lot
of different features of the library, we recommend installing
the development version, which comes with all the required
dependencies for pretty much any imaginable use case:
!pip install transformers[sentencepiece]
This will take a bit of time, but then you’ll be ready to go for
the rest of the course!
Using a Python virtual environment
If you prefer to use a Python virtual environment, the first step
is to install Python on your system. We recommend following
this guide to get started.
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Once you have Python installed, you should be able to run
Python commands in your terminal. You can start by running
the following command to ensure that it is correctly installed
before proceeding to the next steps: python --version . This
should print out the Python version now available on your
system.
When running a Python command in your terminal, such as
python --version , you should think of the program running
your command as the “main” Python on your system. We
recommend keeping this main installation free of any
packages, and using it to create separate environments for
each application you work on — this way, each application can
have its own dependencies and packages, and you won’t need
to worry about potential compatibility issues with other
applications.
In Python this is done with virtual environments, which are
self-contained directory trees that each contain a Python
installation with a particular Python version alongside all the
packages the application needs. Creating such a virtual
environment can be done with a number of different tools, but
we’ll use the official Python package for that purpose, which is
called venv.
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First, create the directory you’d like your application to live in
— for example, you might want to make a new directory called
transformers-course at the root of your home directory:
mkdir ~/transformers-course
cd ~/transformers-course
From inside this directory, create a virtual environment using
the Python venv module:
python -m venv .env
You should now have a directory called .env in your otherwise
empty folder:
ls -a
. .. .env
You can jump in and out of your virtual environment with the
activate and deactivate scripts:
# Activate the virtual environment
source .env/bin/activate
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# Deactivate the virtual environment
source .env/bin/deactivate
You can make sure that the environment is activated by
running the which python command: if it points to the virtual
environment, then you have successfully activated it!
which python
/home/<user>/transformers-course/.env/bin/python
Installing dependencies
As in the previous section on using Google Colab instances,
you’ll now need to install the packages required to continue.
Again, you can install the development version of 🤗
Transformers using the pip package manager:
pip install "transformers[sentencepiece]"
You’re now all set up and ready to go!
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