Run Flower Quickstart Examples with Docker Compose#

Flower provides a set of quickstart examples to help you get started with the framework. These examples are designed to demonstrate the capabilities of Flower and by default run using the Simulation Engine. This guide demonstrates how to run them using Flower’s Deployment Engine via Docker Compose.

Important

Some quickstart examples may have limitations or requirements that prevent them from running on every environment. For more information, please see Limitations.

Prerequisites#

Before you start, make sure that:

The flwr CLI is installed locally.
The Docker daemon is running.
Docker Compose is installed.

Run the Quickstart Example#

Clone the quickstart example you like to run. For example, quickstart-pytorch:

$ git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/adap/flower.git \
     && mv flower/examples/quickstart-pytorch . \
     && rm -rf flower && cd quickstart-pytorch

Download the compose.yml file into the example directory:

$ curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/adap/flower/refs/heads/main/src/docker/complete/compose.yml \
    -o compose.yml

Build and start the services using the following command:
```
$ docker compose up --build -d
```
Append the following lines to the end of the pyproject.toml file and save it:
pyproject.toml#
```
[tool.flwr.federations.local-deployment]
address = "127.0.0.1:9093"
insecure = true
```
Note

You can customize the string that follows tool.flwr.federations. to fit your needs. However, please note that the string cannot contain a dot (.).

In this example, local-deployment has been used. Just remember to replace local-deployment with your chosen name in both the tool.flwr.federations. string and the corresponding flwr run . command.
Run the example:
```
$ flwr run . local-deployment
```
Follow the logs of the SuperExec service:
```
$ docker compose logs superexec -f
```

That is all it takes! You can monitor the progress of the run through the logs of the SuperExec.

Run a Different Quickstart Example#

To run a different quickstart example, such as quickstart-tensorflow, first, shut down the Docker Compose services of the current example:

$ docker compose down

After that, you can repeat the steps above.

Limitations#

Quickstart Example	Limitations
quickstart-fastai	None
examples/quickstart-huggingface	For CPU-only environments, it requires at least 32GB of memory.
quickstart-jax	The example has not yet been updated to work with the latest `flwr` version.
quickstart-mlcube	The example has not yet been updated to work with the latest `flwr` version.
quickstart-mlx	Requires to run on macOS with Apple Silicon.
quickstart-monai	None
quickstart-pandas	The example has not yet been updated to work with the latest `flwr` version.
quickstart-pytorch-lightning	Requires an older pip version that is not supported by the Flower Docker images.
quickstart-pytorch	None
quickstart-sklearn-tabular	None
quickstart-tabnet	The example has not yet been updated to work with the latest `flwr` version.
quickstart-tensorflow	Only runs on AMD64.