Today, I wanted to mess around with PyTorch in a Java project, and I figured, why not use Maven to manage things? It seemed straightforward enough, but let me tell you, it wasn’t as smooth as I thought it would be.
First off, I fired up my IDE and created a new Maven project. You know the drill, choose the archetype, fill in the group ID and artifact ID, and boom, project skeleton ready to go. Next, I needed to add the PyTorch dependency to my file. I searched a bit on the internet and found that there are different flavors for different platforms, so I had to pick the one that matched my setup.
I opted for the CPU version since I wasn’t planning on doing anything too heavy. I copied the dependency snippet and pasted it into the <dependencies> section of my . It looked something like this:
<dependency>
<groupId>*</groupId>
<artifactId>pytorch_cpu</artifactId>
<version>1.9.0</version> <!-- or whatever version you need -->
</dependency>
After that, I refreshed my Maven project in the IDE to let it download the necessary JAR files. That took a little while, as PyTorch is quite a hefty library. Once the download finished, I thought I was good to go. But when I tried to write some simple PyTorch code in Java, I ran into a bunch of errors.
It turns out, just adding the main PyTorch library wasn’t enough. I also needed to include a platform-specific JNI library. This was a bit of a head-scratcher, but after some more digging around, I found that I had to add another dependency, something like pytorch_jni_cpu, again, making sure the version matched the main PyTorch library.
So, back to the I went, and I added the JNI dependency right below the main one. Another Maven refresh, another round of downloads, and finally, things started to work. I could import the PyTorch classes, create tensors, and perform basic operations without any errors.
Summary of My Little Adventure
Started with creating a new Maven project in my IDE.
Added the main PyTorch dependency to the .
Ran into errors because the platform-specific JNI library was missing.
Figured out that I needed to add the JNI dependency as well.
Finally got everything working after adding the JNI dependency and refreshing Maven.
It was a bit of a bumpy ride, but I eventually managed to set up PyTorch with Maven. The key takeaway is to make sure you include both the main PyTorch library and the correct platform-specific JNI library in your . If you’re just starting out, that might not be immediately obvious, but keep it in mind, and you’ll save yourself some trouble.
