Flower

Use this repo skill for the Flower ecosystem: the flwr framework, Flower Datasets, example app patterns, local simulation and deployment workflows, and repo-maintenance commands for the Flower checkout itself.

Start here

If you are trying to decide where a task belongs, route by intent:

• App authoring and customization → sub-skills/app-development/
• Strategies, aggregation, mods, and checkpoint-aware behavior → sub-skills/strategies-and-mods/
• Local simulation, SuperLink/SuperNode, CLI, and deployment routing → sub-skills/simulation-and-deployment/
• Flower Datasets and example app patterns → sub-skills/datasets-and-examples/
• Contributor commands, public API exposure, protobufs, migrations, and docs → sub-skills/repository-maintenance/

Install and inspect

Work in an isolated Python 3.11 environment and install the Flower packages you need for the task.

• For ordinary package use and inspection, install flwr and flwr-datasets.
• For simulation or deployment workflows, add the documented optional runtime pieces only when the task actually needs them.
• For maintainer tasks, use the repository's dev commands in the package-owned project directory rather than the runtime inspection environment.

A minimal smoke check is:

python -c "import flwr, flwr_datasets; print(flwr.__version__, flwr_datasets.__version__)"

For a more complete read-only smoke, run scripts/check_flower_install.py.

Useful runtime helpers

• scripts/check_flower_install.py checks package imports, versions, safe CLI help/version output, app-component wiring, and tiny Flower Datasets partitioner behavior.
• scripts/catalog_examples.py summarizes the example app catalog and their dependency surfaces.
• scripts/check_public_api.py verifies public exports for __all__-based packages.

Read next

• references/troubleshooting.md for cross-cutting install, import, CLI, optional-dependency, and runtime issues.
• references/repo-provenance.md to decide whether this skill matches the current checkout or should be refreshed.
• references/repo-routing-metadata.json for router metadata consumed by repo-skills-router.

Package surfaces

The inspected runtime packages expose these public roots:

• flwr → app, clientapp, serverapp, agentapp
• flwr_datasets → FederatedDataset, partitioner, preprocessor, metrics, utils, visualization

The sub-skills contain the detailed API notes, workflows, and troubleshooting for each workflow family.