This is the Docker configuration which allows you to run and tweak the book's notebooks without installing any dependencies on your machine!
OK, any except docker and docker-compose.
And optionally make.
And a few more things if you want GPU support (see below for details).

Follow the instructions on Install Docker and Install Docker Compose for your environment if you haven't got docker and docker-compose already.

Some general knowledge about docker infrastructure might be useful (that's an interesting topic on its own) but is not strictly required to just run the notebooks.

The first option is to pull the image from Docker Hub (this will download about 1.9 GB of compressed data):

$ docker pull ageron/handson-ml3

Note: this is the CPU-only image. For GPU support, read the GPU section below.

Alternatively, you can build the image yourself. This will be slower, but it will ensure the image is up to date, with the latest libraries. For this, assuming you already downloaded this project into the directory /path/to/project/handson-ml3:

$ cd /path/to/project/handson-ml3/docker
$ docker-compose build

This will take quite a while, but is only required once.

After the process is finished you have an ageron/handson-ml3:latest image, that will be the base for your experiments. You can confirm that by running the following command:

$ docker images
REPOSITORY            TAG         IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE
ageron/handson-ml3    latest      3ebafebc604a        2 minutes ago       4.87GB

Still assuming you already downloaded this project into the directory /path/to/project/handson-ml3, run the following commands to start the Jupyter server inside the container, which is named handson-ml3:

$ cd /path/to/project/handson-ml3/docker
$ docker-compose up

Next, just point your browser to the URL printed on the screen (or go to http:https://localhost:8888 if you enabled password authentication inside the jupyter_notebook_config.py file, before building the image) and you're ready to play with the book's code!

The server runs in the directory containing the notebooks, and the changes you make from the browser will be persisted there.

You can close the server just by pressing Ctrl-C in the terminal window.

If you have make installed on your computer, you can use it as a thin layer to run docker-compose commands. For example, executing make rebuild will actually run docker-compose build --no-cache, which will rebuild the image without using the cache. This ensures that your image is based on the latest version of the continuumio/miniconda3 image which the ageron/handson-ml3 image is based on.

If you don't have make (and you don't want to install it), just examine the contents of Makefile to see which docker-compose commands you can run instead.

Run make exec (or docker-compose exec handson-ml3 bash) while the server is running to run an additional bash shell inside the handson-ml3 container. Now you're inside the environment prepared within the image.

One of the useful things that can be done there would be starting TensorBoard (for example with simple tb command, see bashrc file).

Another one may be comparing versions of the notebooks using the nbdiff command if you haven't got nbdime installed locally (it is way better than plain diff for notebooks). See Tools for diffing and merging of Jupyter notebooks for more details.

You can see changes you made relative to the version in git using git diff which is integrated with nbdiff.

You may also try nbd NOTEBOOK_NAME.ipynb command (custom, see bashrc file) to compare one of your notebooks with its checkpointed version.
To be precise, the output will tell you what modifications should be re-played on the manually saved version of the notebook (located in .ipynb_checkpoints subdirectory) to update it to the current i.e. auto-saved version (given as command's argument - located in working directory).

If you're running on Linux, and you have a TensorFlow-compatible GPU card (NVidia card with Compute Capability ≥ 3.5) that you would like TensorFlow to use inside the Docker container, then you should download and install the latest driver for your card from nvidia.com. You will also need to install NVidia Docker support: if you are using Docker 19.03 or above, you must install the nvidia-container-toolkit package, and for earlier versions, you must install nvidia-docker2.

Next, edit the docker-compose.yml file:

$ cd /path/to/project/handson-ml3/docker
$ edit docker-compose.yml  # use your favorite editor

• Replace dockerfile: ./docker/Dockerfile with dockerfile: ./docker/Dockerfile.gpu
• Replace image: ageron/handson-ml3:latest with image: ageron/handson-ml3:latest-gpu
• If you want to use docker-compose, you will need version 1.28 or above for GPU support, and you must uncomment the whole deploy section in docker-compose.yml.

If you want to pull the prebuilt image from Docker Hub (this will download over 3.5 GB of compressed data):

$ docker pull ageron/handson-ml3:latest-gpu

If you prefer to build the image yourself:

$ cd /path/to/project/handson-ml3/docker
$ docker-compose build

If you have docker-compose version 1.28 or above, that's great! You can simply run:

$ cd /path/to/project/handson-ml3/docker
$ docker-compose up
[...]
     or http:https://127.0.0.1:8888/?token=[...]

Then point your browser to the URL and Jupyter should appear. If you then open or create a notebook and execute the following code, a list containing your GPU device(s) should be displayed (success!):

import tensorflow as tf

tf.config.list_physical_devices("GPU")

To stop the server, just press Ctrl-C.

If you have a version of docker-compose earlier than 1.28, you will have to use docker run directly.

If you are using Docker 19.03 or above, you can run:

$ cd /path/to/project/handson-ml3
$ docker run --name handson-ml3 --gpus all -p 8888:8888 -p 6006:6006 --log-opt mode=non-blocking --log-opt max-buffer-size=50m -v `pwd`:/home/devel/handson-ml3 ageron/handson-ml3:latest-gpu /opt/conda/envs/homl3/bin/jupyter notebook --ip='0.0.0.0' --port=8888 --no-browser

If you are using an older version of Docker, then replace --gpus all with --runtime=nvidia.

Now point your browser to the displayed URL: Jupyter should appear, and you can open a notebook and run import tensorflow as tf and tf.config.list_physical_devices("GPU) as above to confirm that TensorFlow does indeed see your GPU device(s).

Lastly, to interrupt the server, press Ctrl-C, then run:

$ docker rm handson-ml3

This will remove the container so you can start a new one later (but it will not remove the image or the notebooks, don't worry!).

Have fun!