If you’re unfamiliar with Vowpal Wabbit, this documentation is no substitute for the detailed tutorials at the VW wiki. You’ll eventually need to read those to understand VW’s advanced features.

You have three installation options, depending on your comfort with compiling and installing the VW utility.

If you already have Vowpal Wabbit installed:

pip install wabbit_wappa

If you still need to install VW (currently version 7.6) and its dependencies:

Start by cloning the WW repository:

git clone https://github.com/mokelly/wabbit_wappa.git cd wabbit_wappa

Then run the included install script (which more or less follows the VW instructions):

scripts/vw-install.sh export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/lib; python setup.py install

(The “export” line should be added to your .profile if you don’t want to run it every time you use Vowpal Wabbit.)

If you want a virtual machine with everything all set up for you:

Windows users, this is your only option at present

First install the virtual machine manager Vagrant along with your favorite virtualization system (such as VirtualBox). Then from the Wabbit Wappa source directory type:

vagrant up

This will launch an Ubuntu VM and provision it with VW and WW, completely automatically! Once that’s all complete, just SSH to your new VM with:

vagrant ssh