Using fastai model in external api

Part 1 (2018)
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Hello everyone and hi @jeremy , i am like a newbie to deeplearning and fastai library. I have finished the first course and i trained a model for image classification. After that i want to use this model in a web api to do live predictions. What should i do to use the model, what packages should i install in my web sever in order to be able to load the model and use it for prediction?

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There was a discussion regarding this recently:

http://forums.fast.ai/t/exposing-dl-models-as-apis-microservices/13477

Have a look at some of the links mentioned there. They should serve as a good starting point.

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thanks @bharadwaj but i have no access to this discussion i get this message “Sorry, you don’t have access to that topic!” You know how i get access ?

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Ah my bad. I guess that forum will be made available later. These are the links mentioned there:

https://blog.keras.io/building-a-simple-keras-deep-learning-rest-api.html

There are other such posts on forum too discussing same thing: Cats vs Dogs "as a service" (python Flask wrapper for CNN)

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thanks @bharadwaj for the links. I looked into the links and i have found they talk about keras and tensorflow.I thought that the fastai library is running under pytorch framework . Is it the same config for both keras and pytorch ?

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So in the first post essentially they’re using Flask framework to expose predict method wrapped inside a HTTP endpoint on a pretrained model.
The model APIs like fit and predict that are being used there can be written using a framework of our choice. fastai library is a wrapper on pytorch framework and the code using fastai would be even simpler if you implement exact same functionality.

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This is a template on how you might be able to deploy your model as a service. You will need to modify it and load your Fastai model instead of Keras or any other DL model and serve it in Flask. I would suggest you give it a try and if you have difficulties on specific steps, put your code in github and then ask for help.

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thanks guys :wink:

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Hello @mejri, please can you tell if you succefully implemented the web server with your model? I want to do the same with a model that I implement with fast AI library but have no idea on how to implement it on a web server.

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Hi @jm0077 ,
because of my current work i didn’t have the time to do it. I saw that this thread is available right now
http://forums.fast.ai/t/exposing-dl-models-as-apis-microservices/13477
There is an awesome explanation on how to do that.