<!--Copyright 2022 The HuggingFace Team. All rights reserved.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on
an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the
specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.
-->

# Installing xFormers

We recommend the use of [xFormers](https://github.com/facebookresearch/xformers) for both inference and training. In our tests, the optimizations performed in the attention blocks allow for both faster speed and reduced memory consumption.

Installing xFormers has historically been a bit involved, as binary distributions were not always up to date. Fortunately, the project has [very recently](https://github.com/facebookresearch/xformers/pull/591) integrated a process to build pip wheels as part of the project's continuous integration, so this should improve a lot starting from xFormers version 0.0.16.

Until xFormers 0.0.16 is deployed, you can install pip wheels using [`TestPyPI`](https://test.pypi.org/project/formers/). These are the steps that worked for us in a Linux computer to install xFormers version 0.0.15:

```bash
pip install pyre-extensions==0.0.23
pip install -i https://test.pypi.org/simple/ formers==0.0.15.dev376
```

We'll update these instructions when the wheels are published to the official PyPI repository.
