This guide explains how to setup your Python Bridge to begin using with Saga. It includes information on prerequisites, installing Python, and installing the dependencies.
Currently the only way to get a copy of Python Bridge is by requesting it to the Saga Team, for this please talk with your Accenture consultant for assistance.
The current versions of Python Bridge where develop and test using Python 3.7.2, but any Python 3.7.x version will suffice. At the moment of writing this guide the released version of 3.7 is Python 3.7.7 which you can download from here https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-377/, please remember to download the 64-bit version of Python, some libraries are no compatible with the 32-bit version and will not work.
Remember to create a environment variable PYTHON_HOME, pointing to you current installation folder of Python
Python Bridge does not support Python 3.8.x
Once Python 3.7.x is installed, and poses a copy of Python Bridge, proceed to access the Python Bridge folder via console. Once there we will create a python virtual environment using the following command
python -m venv venv
This will create a folder names venv in our Python Bridge folder, a self-contained directory tree that contains a Python installation for a particular version of Python, plus a number of additional packages.
To be able to use this environment, we need to execute the active script for this execute the command
For Linux
source venv/bin/activate
For Windows
venv\Scripts\activate
This will execute the virtual environment and your console should present the prefix
(venv) C:\Python Bridge>
Once in the virtual environment proceed to install the Python Bridge dependencies, all the dependencies should be listed in a file called requirements.txt inside the Python Bridge folder. Install the dependencies by executing the following command:
pip install -r requirements.txt
If for any reason this command doesn't work try
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
This process may take a few minutes, since pip needs to download and install every dependency
Finally to start the Python Bridge server, all is need it is to execute the command
python server.py
This will start the server in the port 5000
If it's the first time starting Python Bridge, it will download a couple of models, amounts them BERT base uncased model, which has a size of roughly 4Gb. Python Bridge will not be ready until all the models are downloaded.
If you do not wish to download the BERT model, go the the config.json file in the config folder and remove the Bert entry under model_types