Contents

• Introduction to Snapshots
• Setup Instructions
• Limitations
• Configuration of ND4J Backend
• Note to Gradle Users

Overview/Introduction

We provide automated daily builds of our repositories: ND4J/DataVec/DeepLearning4j/RL4J etc. So, all newest functionality & bug fixes are delivered daily.

Snapshots work like any other maven dependencies, just served from custom repository, instead of Maven Central.

Note that due to ongoing development, snapshots should be considered less stable than releases: breaking changes or bugs can in principle be introduced at any point during the course of normal development. Typically, releases (not snapshots) should be used when possible, unless a bug fix or new feature is required.

Setup Instructions

Basically to use snapshots in your project, you should just add snapshot repository information to your pom.xml, like shown below:

<repositories>
    <repository>
        <id>snapshots-repo</id>
        <url>https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots</url>
        <releases>
            <enabled>false</enabled>
        </releases>
        <snapshots>
            <enabled>true</enabled>
            <updatePolicy>daily</updatePolicy>  <!-- Optional, update daily -->
        </snapshots>
    </repository>
</repositories>

And specify snapshot version. We follow simple rule. If latest stable release version is A.B.C, snapshot version will be A.B.(C+1)-SNAPSHOT. The current snapshot version is 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.

Limitations

Primary limitation when using snapshots, is absence of -platform artifacts. So, if you’ve been using nd4j-native-platform as your backend, you should be using nd4j-native with snapshots.

ND4J_Backend

If your pom.xml has a dependency for nd4j-native-platform and you switch to using snapshots to get access to a recent feature you will have to switch your nd4j-backend to nd4j-native.

Of note when using the nd4j-native backend, you need to add openblas as a dependency. We do this for you in the -platform pom. Reference the -platform pom here to double check your dependencies. Note that these are version properties. See the <properties> section of the pom for current versions of the openblas and javacpp presets required to run nd4j-native.

Note to gradle users

Snapshots will not work with gradle. You will have to use maven to download the files. After that you may try using your local maven repository with mavenLocal().

A bare minimum file like

version '1.0-SNAPSHOT'
 
apply plugin: 'java'
 
sourceCompatibility = 1.8
 
repositories {
    maven { url "https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots" }
    mavenCentral()
}
 
dependencies {
    compile group: 'org.deeplearning4j', name: 'deeplearning4j-core', version: '1.0.0-SNAPSHOT'
    compile group: 'org.deeplearning4j', name: 'deeplearning4j-modelimport', version: '1.0.0-SNAPSHOT'
    compile "org.nd4j:nd4j-native:1.0.0-SNAPSHOT"
    // Use windows-x86_64 or linux-x86_64 if you are not on macos
    compile "org.nd4j:nd4j-native:1.0.0-SNAPSHOT:macosx-x86_64"
    testCompile group: 'junit', name: 'junit', version: '4.12'
 
}

should work but does not. This is due to a bug in gradle

Gradle with snapshots and maven classifiers appears to be a problem.