You can easily run the Ufora backend locally on your machine using docker. Then you can connect pyfora to your local backend and start using it to speed up your python code.

What You Need to Get Started

## OS You’ll need an OS that can run docker. Currently this means:

• A reasonably recent version of a 64-bit Linux distribution such as: Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat, Fedora, Centos, Gentoo, Suse, Amazon, Oracle, etc.
• OS X 10.8 “Mountain Lion” or newer.
• Windows 7.1, 8/8.1 or newer.

Python

Ufora’s python client, pyfora, requires CPython 2.7.

Note: Python 3 is not supported yet.

Important: Only official CPython distributions from python.org are supported at this time. This is what OS X and most Linux distributions include by default as their “native” Python.

Install pyfora

$ [sudo] pip install pyfora

Install Docker

Docker is available for Linux, OS X, or Windows. To install docker on your machine, visit http://www.docker.com/, click the Get Started link, and follow the instructions.

You can also, optionally, follow these instructions to be able to run docker commands without sudo. Note, however, that the docker daemon still runs as root - it just saves you five keystrokes when running docker commands.

Pull the Ufora Service Image

Once docker is installed, you can pull the latest Ufora service image.

$ sudo docker pull ufora/service:latest

Note: Depending on your docker setup, you may need to run the last command, and subsequent docker commands, as root, by using sudo, for example.

Important: If you are not using the most recent pyfora release and don’t want to upgrade, you will need to use a docker image compatible with your version. For example, if you are using pyfora version 0.2, you can pull and use the ufora/service:0.2 image.

Start the Ufora Container

The command below starts an all-in-one docker container that runs all the Ufora backend services needed to support pyfora. To run a Ufora cluster on multiple machines in a local network, follow the instructions here.

Create a local directory for the Ufora service logs:

$ mkdir ~/ufora

From your terminal run:

$ sudo docker run -d --name ufora -p 30000:30000 -v /home/user/ufora:/var/ufora ufora/service

Replace the path /home/user with your own home directory path.

What does this do?

• docker run launches a new docker container.
• -d starts the container as daemon that runs in the background.
• --name ufora names the new container ufora for easy reference in subsequent commands.
• -p 30000:30000 maps port 30000 - Ufora’s default HTTP port - to the same port number in your host OS. This lets pyfora connect to the container using http://localhost:30000.
• -v /home/user/ufora:/var/ufora mounts the local directory ~/ufora into /var/ufora within the container. This is where Ufora writes all of its log files.
• ufora/service is the name of the Ufora service image to run. To use a version other than the latest, specify a version tag (e.g. ufora/service:0.2).

Run Some Code

You are now ready to connect pyfora to your running container and run some code. Create a new Python file called tryfora.py with the following content:

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import pyfora

ufora = pyfora.connect('http://localhost:30000')

def isPrime(p):
    x = 2
    while x*x <= p:
        if p%x == 0:
            return 0
        x = x + 1
    return 1

print "Counting primes..."
with ufora.remotely.downloadAll():
    result = sum(isPrime(x) for x in xrange(10 * 1000 * 1000))

print result

Congratulations! You just ran your first Ufora computations and counted the number of primes between 0 and 10 million. The computation inside the with block (line 15) was shipped to the Ufora worker running in the docker container, which then compiled it to efficient machine code and ran it parallel on all cores available on your machine.

Stop the Ufora Container

When you are done and want to stop the Ufora service container, run:

$ sudo docker stop ufora

This stops the container but does preserves its state so it can be restarted at a later time.

To permanently delete the container and all its state, run the following command after stopping the container:

$ sudo docker rm ufora

Restart the Ufora Container

To restart a stopped Ufora service container, run:

$ sudo docker start ufora