Install TensorFlow for C

TensorFlow provides a C API that can be used to build bindings for other languages. The API is defined in c_api.h and designed for simplicity and uniformity rather than convenience.

Supported Platforms

TensorFlow for C is supported on the following systems:

• Linux, 64-bit, x86
• macOS X, Version 10.12.6 (Sierra) or higher
• Windows, 64-bit x86

Setup

Download

Extract

Extract the downloaded archive, which contains the header files to include in your C program and the shared libraries to link against.

On Linux and macOS, you may want to extract to /usr/local/lib:

sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf (downloaded file)

Linker

On Linux/macOS, if you extract the TensorFlow C library to a system directory, such as /usr/local, configure the linker with ldconfig:

sudo ldconfig

If you extract the TensorFlow C library to a non-system directory, such as ~/mydir, then configure the linker environmental variables:

export LIBRARY_PATH=$LIBRARY_PATH:~/mydir/lib
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:~/mydir/lib

export LIBRARY_PATH=$LIBRARY_PATH:~/mydir/lib
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH:~/mydir/lib

Build

Example program

With the TensorFlow C library installed, create an example program with the following source code (hello_tf.c):

#include <stdio.h>
#include <tensorflow/c/c_api.h>

int main() {
  printf("Hello from TensorFlow C library version %s\n", TF_Version());
  return 0;
}

Compile

Compile the example program to create an executable, then run:

gcc hello_tf.c -ltensorflow -o hello_tf

./hello_tf

The command outputs: Hello from TensorFlow C library version number

If the program doesn't build, make sure that gcc can access the TensorFlow C library. If extracted to /usr/local, explicitly pass the library location to the compiler:

gcc -I/usr/local/include -L/usr/local/lib hello_tf.c -ltensorflow -o hello_tf

Build from source

TensorFlow is open source. Read the instructions to build TensorFlow's C library from source code.