Caffe-Builder

Caffe-Builder is a set of CMake scripts (using CMake's ExternalProject) that automate the build and installation of the Caffe library and its dependencies.

Using this project will (hopefully) make building and installation of Caffe on Windows much easier.

Building Caffe with Caffe-Builder

Get the Prerequisites

• CMake (tested with 3.2)
• Visual Studio (tested with 2013 in 64 bit mode)
• Git
• CUDA (tested with 7.0) for GPU support

Clone this repository:

cmd> git clone https://github.com/willyd/caffe-builder.git caffe-builder

Create a build directory and configure CMake to build Caffe-Builder inside:

cmd> md ..\build
cmd> cd ..\build
cmd> cmake -G "<your generator>" ..\caffe-builder

CMake will download all the sources and files required to compile Caffe and its dependencies to the folder build\DownloadCache. This can take some time.

Build the project

cmd> cmake --build .

Alternatively you can build the caffe-builder.sln by opening it in Visual Studio. Build only one configuration as the project is setup to build the two configuration for each project in batch. After some time you should have both Debug and Release binaries for Caffe and all its dependencies in the build\install folder. All libraries are built as static libraries. Please note that building Caffe as a shared library is not supported right now with Visual Studio.

Known issues

• Sometimes a download will fail. This seems to happen only for archives downloaded from sourceforge. Executing cmake (or clicking the Configure button in CMake-Gui) usually solves the problems.
• Even though LMDB builds successfully it does not work and hence the related Caffe tests will fail. This most likely related to this: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/caffe-users/0RKsTTYRGpQ
• For some reasons the implementation of usleep on Windows does not stop the cuda threads and four Caffe tests fail.
• When Caffe-Builder builds boost it may output errors to the Error List Window in Visual Studio. You can safely ignore the following errors:
  • Error 334 error C1189: #error : "Not SPARC"
  • Error 333 error C1189: #error : "Not PPC"
  • Error 332 error C1189: #error : "Not MIPS1"
  • Error 331 error C1189: #error : "Not ARM"
  • Error 335 error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'unicode/uversion.h': No such file or directory