Get Started¶

Installation¶

Bionic can be installed using pip:

pip install bionic[standard]

The bionic[standard] package includes the core framework as well as the most commonly-used dependencies. There are several other subpackages offering different dependencies, documented below.

You will probably also want to install Graphviz, which Bionic uses to generate visualizations of its workflow graph. Unfortunately Graphviz is not written in Python and can’t be installed by pip. On Mac OS X, you can use Homebrew to install it:

brew install graphviz

If you want your data to be automatically cached to Google Cloud Storage, you’ll also need to have the Google Cloud SDK installed, have access to a GCS bucket, and install the bionic[gcp] subpackage.

Finally, installing LibYAML will improve performance for some workloads. LibYAML is also available via Homebrew:

brew install libyaml

Bionic supports Python 3.6 and above.

Extra Packages¶

The default bionic PyPI package installs only the minimal dependencies for building and running flows. However, many other dependency configurations are available. Most users will want the bionic[standard] package, which supports common integrations like Matplotlib, as well as graph visualization.

The full set of subpackages is as follows:

Subpackage	Installation Command	Enables
dev	`pip install bionic[dev]`	every feature; testing; building documentation
dask	`pip install bionic[dask]`	the `@dask` decorator
dill	`pip install bionic[dill]`	the `@dillable` decorator
examples	`pip install bionic[examples]`	the tutorial example code
full	`pip install bionic[full]`	every non-development feature
gcp	`pip install bionic[gcp]`	caching to GCS
image	`pip install bionic[image]`	automatic de/serialization of `PIL.Image` objects
matplotlib	`pip install bionic[matplotlib]`	the `@pyplot` decorator
standard	`pip install bionic[standard]`	graph visualization; `Image` handling; `@pyplot`
viz	`pip install bionic[viz]`	graph visualization

Tutorials¶

These two worked examples illustrate the basic mechanics of Bionic.