How to install Turi Create on Windows 10

4 min readDec 12, 2019

This article provides a tutorial on how to install turicreate on Windows 10. If you are taking the Machine Learning Foundations: A Case Study Approach course offered by the University of Washington on Coursera, you will have encountered turicreate. Turi Create is an open-source toolset that simplifies the development of machine learning models including, image classification, object detection, recommendations and more.

Unfortunately, there’s no direct way to install Turi Create on Windows 10. You will have to use a Windows subsystem for Linux (WSL).

Install Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

For this tutorial, we will install the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS distro for WSL. You must first enable the “Windows Subsystem for Linux” feature.

Open Powershell as Administrators and run the following command:

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux

2. When prompted, restart your computer.

3. Launch the Microsoft Store and search for Linux. Select the Linux distribution of your choice. For this tutorial, we are using the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS distro.

“Linux” search results on Microsoft Store

4. From the distro’s page, select get, and install.

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5. Launch the distro from the Start menu or by clicking the “launch” button on Microsft Store.

6. You will have to initialize your new distro. Follow the prompts to set up a new Linux account (username and password). You will need your password later when installing packages using sudo.

7. Update and upgrade your distros packages. This will take a few minutes.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Congratulations! You are done setting up your WSL with a Linux distro.

Install and setup virtualenv

Install dependencies:

sudo apt-get install -y libstdc++6 python-setuptoolssudo apt-get install python3-pip

2. Install virtualenv using pip3:

sudo pip3 install virtualenv

3. Create a new virtual environment:

virtualenv venv

4. Activate your virtual environment:

source venv/bin/activate

Install Jupyter Notebook in your Vurtualenv

Install jupyter notebook in your virtual environment:

pip3 install jupyter

2. To test your installation of both, open Jupiter notebook:

jupyter notebook

WSL does not support graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Therefore, instead of Jupyter Notebook opening in a new browser tab, you will get a link to the server (localhost). You will get something like this:

The Notebook is running at: 
http://localhost:8888/?token=6b0e4a3b7493fa0686a9906c89866fd0c344ae60d8fabbba
or 
http://127.0.0.1:8888/?token=6b0e4a3b7493fa0686a9906c89866fd0c344ae60d8fabbba

Copy either of the two links from your terminal to your browser. Jupyter notebook should open with the following welcome screen:

Install Turi Create in your virtual environment

This is the final part of setting up your development environment with Turi Create.

Make sure you are still in your virtual environment (venv). Install turicreate using the following script:

pip3 install turicreate

3. Create a new python file in your notebook, and type and run the following line of code to test your turicreate installation. If you don’t get an error message, it means your installation was successful.

import turicreate as tc

Bonus

Run the following code to look up documentation on Turi Create.

tc??

You should get the following results.

Viewing turicreate documentation from Jupyter Notebook

You’re done! Congratulations on finishing the tutorial and setting up your development environment.

Additional Resources:

You may find the following resources useful in your journey to learning turicreate.

Edit

Unfortunately, I’m unable to help you resolve some of the errors in the comments. Please be patient and try googling the error. It’s highly likely that someone else has faced it before.

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