Contents

Building Ray from Source

For a majority of Ray users, installing Ray via the latest wheels or pip package is usually enough. However, you may want to build the latest master branch.

Tip

If you are only editing Python files, follow instructions for Building Ray (Python Only) to avoid long build times.

Building Ray (Python Only)

Note

Unless otherwise stated, directory and file paths are relative to the project root directory.

RLlib, Tune, Autoscaler, and most Python files do not require you to build and compile Ray. Follow these instructions to develop Ray’s Python files locally without building Ray.

  1. (Optional) To setup an isolated Anaconda environment, see Installing Ray with Anaconda.

  2. Pip install the latest Ray wheels. See Daily Releases (Nightlies) for instructions.

# For example, for Python 3.8:
pip install -U https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/ray-wheels/latest/ray-3.0.0.dev0-cp38-cp38-manylinux2014_x86_64.whl

  1. Fork and clone the project to your machine. Connect your repository to the upstream (main project) ray repository.

git clone https://github.com/[your username]/ray.git
cd ray
git remote add upstream https://github.com/ray-project/ray.git
# Make sure you are up-to-date on master.

3. Replace Python files in the installed package with your local editable copy. We provide a simple script to help you do this: python python/ray/setup-dev.py. Running the script will remove the ray/tune, ray/rllib, ray/autoscaler dir (among other directories) bundled with the ray pip package, and replace them with links to your local code. This way, changing files in your git clone will directly affect the behavior of your installed ray.

# This replaces `<package path>/site-packages/ray/<package>`
# with your local `ray/python/ray/<package>`.
python python/ray/setup-dev.py

Warning

Do not run pip uninstall ray or pip install -U (for Ray or Ray wheels) if setting up your environment this way. To uninstall or upgrade, you must first rm -rf the pip-installation site (usually a site-packages/ray location), then do a pip reinstall (see 1. above), and finally run the above setup-dev.py script again.

# To uninstall, delete the symlinks first.
rm -rf <package path>/site-packages/ray # Path will be in the output of `setup-dev.py`.
pip uninstall ray # or `pip install -U <wheel>`

Building Ray on Linux & MacOS (full)

Tip

If you are only editing Tune/RLlib/Autoscaler files, follow instructions for Building Ray (Python Only) to avoid long build times.

To build Ray, first install the following dependencies.

For Ubuntu, run the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential curl unzip psmisc

For RHELv8 (Redhat EL 8.0-64 Minimal), run the following commands:

sudo yum groupinstall 'Development Tools'
sudo yum install psmisc

Install bazel manually from link: https://docs.bazel.build/versions/main/install-redhat.html

For MacOS, run the following commands:

Tip

Assuming you already have brew and bazel installed on your mac and you also have grpc and protobuf installed on your mac consider removing those (grpc and protobuf) for smooth build through commands brew uninstall grpc, brew uninstall protobuf. If you have built the source code earlier and it still fails with error as No such file or directory:, try cleaning previous builds on your host by running commands brew uninstall binutils and bazel clean --expunge.

brew update
brew install wget

Ray can be built from the repository as follows.

git clone https://github.com/ray-project/ray.git

# Install Bazel.
ray/ci/env/install-bazel.sh
# (Windows users: please manually place Bazel in your PATH, and point
# BAZEL_SH to MSYS2's Bash: ``set BAZEL_SH=C:\Program Files\Git\bin\bash.exe``)

# Build the dashboard
# (requires Node.js, see https://nodejs.org/ for more information).
pushd ray/dashboard/client
npm install
npm run build
popd

# Install Ray.
cd ray/python
pip install -e . --verbose  # Add --user if you see a permission denied error.

The -e means “editable”, so changes you make to files in the Ray directory will take effect without reinstalling the package.

Warning

if you run python setup.py install, files will be copied from the Ray directory to a directory of Python packages (/lib/python3.6/site-packages/ray). This means that changes you make to files in the Ray directory will not have any effect.

Tip

If your machine is running out of memory during the build or the build is causing other programs to crash, try adding the following line to ~/.bazelrc:

build --local_ram_resources=HOST_RAM*.5 --local_cpu_resources=4

The build --disk_cache=~/bazel-cache option can be useful to speed up repeated builds too.

Building Ray on Windows (full)

Requirements

The following links were correct during the writing of this section. In case the URLs changed, search at the organizations’ sites.

Steps

  1. Enable Developer mode on Windows 10 systems. This is necessary so git can create symlinks.

    1. Open Settings app;

    2. Go to “Update & Security”;

    3. Go to “For Developers” on the left pane;

    4. Turn on “Developer mode”.

  2. Add the following Miniconda subdirectories to PATH. If Miniconda was installed for all users, the following paths are correct. If Miniconda is installed for a single user, adjust the paths accordingly.

    • C:\ProgramData\Miniconda3

    • C:\ProgramData\Miniconda3\Scripts

    • C:\ProgramData\Miniconda3\Library\bin

  3. Define an environment variable BAZEL_SH to point to bash.exe. If git for Windows was installed for all users, bash’s path should be C:\Program Files\Git\bin\bash.exe. If git was installed for a single user, adjust the path accordingly.

4. Bazel 4.2 installation. Go to bazel 4.2 release web page and download bazel-4.2.1-windows-x86_64.exe. Copy the exe into the directory of your choice. Define an environment variable BAZEL_PATH to full exe path (example: set BAZEL_PATH=C:\bazel\bazel.exe). Also add the bazel directory to the PATH (example: set PATH=%PATH%;C:\bazel)

  1. Download ray source code and build it.

# cd to the directory under which the ray source tree will be downloaded.
git clone -c core.symlinks=true https://github.com/ray-project/ray.git
cd ray\python
pip install -e . --verbose

Environment variables that influence builds

You can tweak the build with the following environment variables (when running setup.py):

  • BUILD_JAVA: If set and equal to 1, extra build steps will be executed to build java portions of the codebase

  • RAY_INSTALL_CPP: If set and equal to 1, ray-cpp will be installed

  • RAY_DISABLE_EXTRA_CPP: If set and equal to 1, a regular (non - cpp) build will not provide some cpp interfaces

  • SKIP_BAZEL_BUILD: If set and equal to 1, no bazel build steps will be executed

  • SKIP_THIRDPARTY_INSTALL: If set will skip installation of third-party python packages

  • RAY_DEBUG_BUILD: Can be set to debug, asan, or tsan. Any other value will be ignored

  • BAZEL_LIMIT_CPUS: If set, it must be an integers. This will be fed to the --local_cpu_resources argument for the call to bazel, which will limit the number of CPUs used during bazel steps.

  • IS_AUTOMATED_BUILD: Used in CI to tweak the build for the CI machines

  • SRC_DIR: Can be set to the root of the source checkout, defaults to None which is cwd()

  • BAZEL_SH: used on Windows to find a bash.exe, see below

  • BAZEL_PATH: used on Windows to find bazel.exe, see below

  • MINGW_DIR: used on Windows to find bazel.exe if not found in BAZEL_PATH

Installing additional dependencies for development

Dependencies for the linter (scripts/format.h) can be installed with:

pip install -r python/requirements_linters.txt

Dependencies for running Ray unit tests under python/ray/tests can be installed with:

pip install -r python/requirements.txt

Requirement files for running Ray Data / ML library tests are under python/requirements/.

Fast, Debug, and Optimized Builds

Currently, Ray is built with optimizations, which can take a long time and interfere with debugging. To perform fast, debug, or optimized builds, you can run the following (via -c fastbuild/dbg/opt, respectively):

bazel build -c fastbuild //:ray_pkg

This will rebuild Ray with the appropriate options (which may take a while). If you need to build all targets, you can use "//:*" instead of //:ray_pkg.

To make this change permanent, you can add an option such as the following line to your user-level ~/.bazelrc file (not to be confused with the workspace-level .bazelrc file):

build --compilation_mode=fastbuild

If you do so, remember to revert this change, unless you want it to affect all of your development in the future.

Using dbg instead of fastbuild generates more debug information, which can make it easier to debug with a debugger like gdb.

Building the Docs

If you make changes that require documentation changes, don’t forget to update the documentation!

When you make documentation changes, build them locally to verify they render correctly. Sphinx is used to generate the documentation.

cd doc
pip install -r requirements-doc.txt
make html

Once done, the docs will be in doc/_build/html. For example, on Mac OSX, you can open the docs (assuming you are still in the doc directory) using open _build/html/index.html.

Using a local repository for dependencies

If you’d like to build Ray with custom dependencies (for example, with a different version of Cython), you can modify your .bzl file as follows:

http_archive(
  name = "cython",
  ...,
) if False else native.new_local_repository(
  name = "cython",
  build_file = "bazel/BUILD.cython",
  path = "../cython",
)

This replaces the existing http_archive rule with one that references a sibling of your Ray directory (named cython) using the build file provided in the Ray repository (bazel/BUILD.cython). If the dependency already has a Bazel build file in it, you can use native.local_repository instead, and omit build_file.

To test switching back to the original rule, change False to True.

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