Creating a conda package

Table of contents

Creating a conda package

Install/update the `conda-build` package

For the creation of conda packages you should always update the builder:

conda install conda-build

conda update conda
conda update conda-build

Requirements

The requirement to build a conda package is a working meta.yml that contains a build recipe. After successful building you will need an anaconda.org account to upload and distribute the package.

Let’s start with the meta.yml

`meta.yml`

The full documentation for the meta.yml is found here. A small breakdown is listed below.

The meta.yml contains all the small things needed to build and updload a conda package:

name
version number
software requirements on the machine running the builder and the future host
build script
test scripts and paths

The most important parts of the meta.yml are:

...
package:
  name: "{{ name|lower }}"
  version: "{{ version }}"

source:
  path: ./

build:
  skip: true # [win]
  number: 0
  script: "{{ PYTHON }} -m pip install . --ignore-installed -vv "

requirements:
  host:
    - python >=3.8
    - pip
  run:
    - python >=3.8

test:
  imports:
    - intro2conda
    - intro2conda.print
...

The package description defines name and version number. source defines where to get the package from relative to the path of the meta.yml. This could also be a git_url or a url that grabs a tar ball. build/script does not have to be a one-liner, but could also be a path to an actual build script relative to the location of the meta.yml file. requirements asks for the necessary software needed to run the build process and the necessary software for potential hosts, e.g. osx-64. The software can also be compilers that are called with a specified build.sh (macos, Linux) or bld.bat (windows). Finally, test could be specified as a script/command or in form of python module names under imports.

Building the conda package

The meta.yml is located in our main intro2conda dir. To run the build process and output the packages locally please run:

conda build intro2conda --croot pkgs

where the --croot option and its argument define the package output path. Particularly important to set should you be running on a remote machine with anaconda loaded as a module.

Indexing

If everything goes smoothly, we can index the packaged directory, so that conda knows we have a package here.

conda index pkgs

Should only take a fraction of a second

Installing the local package

Finally, we can install the local package using

conda install --use-local -c ./pkgs intro2conda

Updoading the package

Make anaconda account on anaconda.org and enter the credentials when being prompted.

anaconda upload path/to/introduction-to-conda/pkgs/osx-64/intro2conda-0.0.1-py310_0.tar.bz2

If the download is successful you should be able to

conda install -c <username> intro2conda

NOTE: You can delete the intro2conda from your channel after uploading on anaconda.org

Creating a conda package

Install/update the conda-build package