FLorist

FLorist is a platform to launch and monitor Federated Learning (FL) training jobs. Its goal is to bridge the gap between state-of-the-art FL algorithm implementations and their applications by providing a system to easily kick off, orchestrate, manage, collect, and summarize the results of FL4Health training jobs.

For a technical deep dive, visit our documentation.

Running FLorist with Docker

The easiest way to get FLorist up and running is to run the Docker images.

1. Installing Docker

In case you don't have Docker installed, install it with the guide below: https://docs.docker.com/desktop/

The FLorist Docker images are going to be located at floristdocker/florist in Docker Hub.

2. Start the client container

To start the client container, download the docker-compose-client.yaml file and run the command below:

docker compose -f docker-compose-client.yaml up

That command will start the client's docker image, which will run the service on port 8001. The authentication service is configured with a default password admin. You will only be able to successfully authenticate to the client if you change the default password, which you can do at the URL below:

http://localhost:8001/change-password/index.html

Note

If you need to run two clients on the same machine, you will need to change a few things in the docker-compose-client.yaml file:

• The name of the service on line 6
• The container_name on line 11
• And the port mapping of your host (the first of the two values) on line 11

3. Start the server containers

To start the server containers, download the docker-compose-server.yaml file and run the command below:

docker compose -f docker-compose-server.yaml up

That command will start 3 containers:

1. A MongoDB container, called florist-mongodb at port 27017, which serves as the application database.
2. A Redis container, called florist-redis at port 6379, which serves as the communication layer between FLorist and the federated learning clients and servers.
3. The FLorist server service itself, at port 3000.

Upon first access to the URL below, the UI will prompt you to authenticate with the default password (admin). Right after it will ask you to change that password in order to keep using the service.

http://localhost:3000/

4. Kicking off training jobs

Once you access the Jobs page, you will need to fill up a few network addresses. In the Docker configuration, those are the following addresses that will work if they are all being run within the same machine:

• Server Address: florist-server:8080 (or any other port between 8080-8200)
• Redis Address: florist-redis:6379
• Client Address: florist-client:8001

Note

If you have more than one client running, you can add another client using the UI controls and use the service name and port you have started your client under. For example, if you have used the service name florist-client-2 and the port 8002, you should fill up in the client address as florist-client-2:8002.

Please also refer to te screenshot below for a sample configuration:

Running FLorist from source

In case you want to run FLorist from the source code, please follow the steps in our CONTRIBUTING.md guide.

Contributing

If you are interested in contributing to the library, please see CONTRIBUTING.md. This file contains many details around contributing to the code base, including development practices, code checks, tests, and more.