How to enable Flower federated learning in Workspaces (BETA)

What is Flower?

Flower is a framework for running federated learning tasks across a network. It has three main components:

  1. A CLI tool for managing the network
  2. SuperLink the network aggregator which manages federated tasks across multiple nodes
  3. SuperNode the deployed node software that runs the FL task on the remote data

Users of the Aridhia DRE can now provision a Flower network inside their hub. The Flower CLI is already integrated with Worksapces, this article explains how a workspace user can create SuperLinks and SuperNodes inside workspaces and then connect these to form a federated network. 

Creating a SuperLink app in a workspace:

  1. Login to workspace and create a new R Web App. Give the app a clear name e.g. SuperLink App. Leave default selected fields and click Create R Web App.

  2. Retrieve the setup script from GitHub. You can find this here.
  3. Run the script using this command in the workspace terminal app ./flower-dre superlink setup.
  4. This script will return the domains that the users will need to whitelist to enable the Flower network.

Creating a SuperNode app in workspace:

To create a SuperNode in a workspace the user follows the same steps as the SuperLink creation above. The only difference is when running the setup script they should use the command ./flower-dre supernode setup.

Starting SuperLink and SuperNode apps 

In each workspace go to R web apps, start your SuperLink and SuperNode app. This starts the network.

Using Flower in the Workspace

In the terminal app of the SuperLink workspacw run the following command:

export PATH="/home/workspace/files/.flwr/bin:$PATH"

You should be able to run flwr command in the app:

Some flwr commands to verify:

You can run the following tasks from the SuperLink workspace:

  • flwr config list - Show SuperLinks
  • flwr supernode list <superlink name> - Show SuperNodes in Superlink
  • flwr run <app path to pyproject.toml> - run a taks 
  • flwr list <superlink name> - checking running tasks

 

Updated on October 05, 2026
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