Note
Pre-built binary wheel for Python
If you are planning to use Python, consider installing XGBoost from a pre-built binary wheel, available from Python Package Index (PyPI). You may download and install it by running
# Ensure that you are downloading one of the following:
# * xgboost-{version}-py2.py3-none-manylinux1_x86_64.whl
# * xgboost-{version}-py2.py3-none-win_amd64.whl
pip3 install xgboost
This page gives instructions on how to build and install XGBoost from scratch on various systems. It consists of two steps:
libxgboost.so for Linux/OSX and xgboost.dll for Windows).
(For R-package installation, please directly refer to R Package Installation.)Note
Use of Git submodules
XGBoost uses Git submodules to manage dependencies. So when you clone the repo, remember to specify --recursive option:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost
For windows users who use github tools, you can open the git shell and type the following command:
git submodule init
git submodule update
Please refer to Trouble Shooting section first if you have any problem during installation. If the instructions do not work for you, please feel free to ask questions at the user forum.
Contents
Our goal is to build the shared library:
libxgboost.soxgboost.dllThe minimal building requirement is
We can edit make/config.mk to change the compile options, and then build by
make. If everything goes well, we can go to the specific language installation section.
On Ubuntu, one builds XGBoost by running
git clone --recursive https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost
cd xgboost; make -j4
First, obtain gcc-7 with Homebrew (https://brew.sh/) to enable multi-threading (i.e. using multiple CPU threads for training). The default Apple Clang compiler does not support OpenMP, so using the default compiler would have disabled multi-threading.
brew install gcc@7
Then install XGBoost with pip:
pip3 install xgboost
You might need to run the command with --user flag if you run into permission errors.
Obtain gcc-7 from Homebrew:
brew install gcc@7
Now clone the repository:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost
Create the build/ directory and invoke CMake. Make sure to add CC=gcc-7 CXX=g++-7 so that Homebrew GCC is selected. After invoking CMake, you can build XGBoost with make:
mkdir build
cd build
CC=gcc-7 CXX=g++-7 cmake ..
make -j4
You may now continue to Python Package Installation.
You need to first clone the XGBoost repo with --recursive option, to clone the submodules.
We recommend you use Git for Windows, as it comes with a standard Bash shell. This will highly ease the installation process.
git submodule init
git submodule update
XGBoost support compilation with Microsoft Visual Studio and MinGW.
After installing Git for Windows, you should have a shortcut named Git Bash. You should run all subsequent steps in Git Bash.
In MinGW, make command comes with the name mingw32-make. You can add the following line into the .bashrc file:
alias make='mingw32-make'
(On 64-bit Windows, you should get MinGW64 instead.) Make sure that the path to MinGW is in the system PATH.
To build with MinGW, type:
cp make/mingw64.mk config.mk; make -j4
See Building XGBoost library for Python for Windows with MinGW-w64 for buildilng XGBoost for Python.
To build with Visual Studio, we will need CMake. Make sure to install a recent version of CMake. Then run the following from the root of the XGBoost directory:
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -G"Visual Studio 12 2013 Win64"
This specifies an out of source build using the MSVC 12 64 bit generator. Open the .sln file in the build directory and build with Visual Studio. To use the Python module you can copy xgboost.dll into python-package/xgboost.
After the build process successfully ends, you will find a xgboost.dll library file inside ./lib/ folder, copy this file to the the API package folder like python-package/xgboost if you are using Python API.
Unofficial windows binaries and instructions on how to use them are hosted on Guido Tapia’s blog.
XGBoost can be built with GPU support for both Linux and Windows using CMake. GPU support works with the Python package as well as the CLI version. See Installing R package with GPU support for special instructions for R.
An up-to-date version of the CUDA toolkit is required.
From the command line on Linux starting from the XGBoost directory:
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DUSE_CUDA=ON
make -j4
Note
Enabling multi-GPU training
By default, multi-GPU training is disabled and only a single GPU will be used. To enable multi-GPU training, set the option USE_NCCL=ON. Multi-GPU training depends on NCCL2, available at this link. Since NCCL2 is only available for Linux machines, multi-GPU training is available only for Linux.
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DUSE_CUDA=ON -DUSE_NCCL=ON -DNCCL_ROOT=/path/to/nccl2
make -j4
On Windows, see what options for generators you have for CMake, and choose one with [arch] replaced with Win64:
cmake -help
Then run CMake as follows:
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -G"Visual Studio 14 2015 Win64" -DUSE_CUDA=ON
Note
Visual Studio 2017 Win64 Generator may not work
Choosing the Visual Studio 2017 generator may cause compilation failure. When it happens, specify the 2015 compiler by adding the -T option:
make .. -G"Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64" -T v140,cuda=8.0 -DR_LIB=ON -DUSE_CUDA=ON
To speed up compilation, the compute version specific to your GPU could be passed to cmake as, e.g., -DGPU_COMPUTE_VER=50.
The above cmake configuration run will create an xgboost.sln solution file in the build directory. Build this solution in release mode as a x64 build, either from Visual studio or from command line:
cmake --build . --target xgboost --config Release
To speed up compilation, run multiple jobs in parallel by appending option -- /MP.
The configuration file config.mk modifies several compilation flags:
- Whether to enable support for various distributed filesystems such as HDFS and Amazon S3
- Which compiler to use
- And some more
To customize, first copy make/config.mk to the project root and then modify the copy.
Alternatively, use CMake.
The Python package is located at python-package/.
There are several ways to install the package:
cd python-package; sudo python setup.py install
You will however need Python distutils module for this to
work. It is often part of the core Python package or it can be installed using your
package manager, e.g. in Debian use
sudo apt-get install python-setuptools
Note
Re-compiling XGBoost
If you recompiled XGBoost, then you need to reinstall it again to make the new library take effect.
PYTHONPATH to tell Python where to find
the library. For example, assume we cloned xgboost on the home directory
~. then we can added the following line in ~/.bashrc.
This option is recommended for developers who change the code frequently. The changes will be immediately reflected once you pulled the code and rebuild the project (no need to call setup again)export PYTHONPATH=~/xgboost/python-package
cd python-package; python setup.py develop --user
import os
os.environ['PATH'] = os.environ['PATH'] + ';C:\\Program Files\\mingw-w64\\x86_64-5.3.0-posix-seh-rt_v4-rev0\\mingw64\\bin'
Windows versions of Python are built with Microsoft Visual Studio. Usually Python binary modules are built with the same compiler the interpreter is built with, raising several potential concerns.
-O3.So you may want to build XGBoost with g++ own your own risk. This opens a can of worms, because MSVC uses Microsoft runtime and MinGW-w64 uses own runtime, and the runtimes have different incompatible memory allocators. But in fact this setup is usable if you know how to deal with it. Here is some experience.
-O3 is OK.-mtune=native is also OK.-march=native gcc flag. Using it causes the Python interpreter to crash if the dll was actually used.mingw32/bin is not in PATH, build a wheel (python setup.py bdist_wheel), open it with an archiver and put the needed dlls to the directory where xgboost.dll is situated. Then you can install the wheel with pip.You can install xgboost from CRAN just like any other R package:
install.packages("xgboost")
For OSX users, single-threaded version will be installed. So only one thread will be used for training. To enable use of multiple threads (and utilize capacity of multi-core CPUs), see the section Installing R package on Mac OSX with multi-threading to install XGBoost from source.
Make sure you have installed git and a recent C++ compiler supporting C++11 (e.g., g++-4.8 or higher).
On Windows, Rtools must be installed, and its bin directory has to be added to PATH during the installation.
Due to the use of git-submodules, devtools::install_github can no longer be used to install the latest version of R package.
Thus, one has to run git to check out the code first:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost
cd xgboost
git submodule init
git submodule update
cd R-package
R CMD INSTALL .
If the last line fails because of the error R: command not found, it means that R was not set up to run from command line.
In this case, just start R as you would normally do and run the following:
setwd('wherever/you/cloned/it/xgboost/R-package/')
install.packages('.', repos = NULL, type="source")
The package could also be built and installed with cmake (and Visual C++ 2015 on Windows) using instructions from the next section, but without GPU support (omit the -DUSE_CUDA=ON cmake parameter).
If all fails, try Building the shared library to see whether a problem is specific to R package or not.
First, obtain gcc-7 with Homebrew (https://brew.sh/) to enable multi-threading (i.e. using multiple CPU threads for training). The default Apple Clang compiler does not support OpenMP, so using the default compiler would have disabled multi-threading.
brew install gcc@7
Now, clone the repository:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost
Create the build/ directory and invoke CMake with option R_LIB=ON. Make sure to add CC=gcc-7 CXX=g++-7 so that Homebrew GCC is selected. After invoking CMake, you can install the R package by running make and make install:
mkdir build
cd build
CC=gcc-7 CXX=g++-7 cmake .. -DR_LIB=ON
make -j4
make install
The procedure and requirements are similar as in Building with GPU support, so make sure to read it first.
On Linux, starting from the XGBoost directory type:
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DUSE_CUDA=ON -DR_LIB=ON
make install -j
When default target is used, an R package shared library would be built in the build area.
The install target, in addition, assembles the package files with this shared library under build/R-package, and runs R CMD INSTALL.
On Windows, CMake with Visual C++ Build Tools (or Visual Studio) has to be used to build an R package with GPU support. Rtools must also be installed (perhaps, some other MinGW distributions with gendef.exe and dlltool.exe would work, but that was not tested).
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -G"Visual Studio 14 2015 Win64" -DUSE_CUDA=ON -DR_LIB=ON
cmake --build . --target install --config Release
When --target xgboost is used, an R package dll would be built under build/Release.
The --target install, in addition, assembles the package files with this dll under build/R-package, and runs R CMD INSTALL.
If cmake can’t find your R during the configuration step, you might provide the location of its executable to cmake like this: -DLIBR_EXECUTABLE="C:/Program Files/R/R-3.4.1/bin/x64/R.exe".
If on Windows you get a “permission denied” error when trying to write to …Program Files/R/… during the package installation, create a .Rprofile file in your personal home directory (if you don’t already have one in there), and add a line to it which specifies the location of your R packages user library, like the following:
.libPaths( unique(c("C:/Users/USERNAME/Documents/R/win-library/3.4", .libPaths())))
You might find the exact location by running .libPaths() in R GUI or RStudio.
Compile failed after git pull
Please first update the submodules, clean all and recompile:
git submodule update && make clean_all && make -j4
Compile failed after config.mk is modified
Need to clean all first:
make clean_all && make -j4
Makefile: dmlc-core/make/dmlc.mk: No such file or directory
We need to recursively clone the submodule:
git submodule init
git submodule update
Alternatively, do another clone
git clone https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost --recursive