Distributing with Conda

Introduction

From their documentation, Conda is

[…] an open source package management system and environment management system that runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. Conda quickly installs, runs and updates packages and their dependencies.

It’s usage is quite similar to virtualenv + pip. It allows to install a set of packages in isolated environments, so even packages with conflicting dependencies can be installed on the same system. Also importantly, it can be installed, or environments created, by the user without requiring any special privileges (no root!).

Conda can be installed either via

• Anaconda, a complete distribution of scientific software, including Python, several scientific packages, and a graphic interface (Anaconda Navigator) on MacOSX.
• Miniconda, a minimal distribution with just Python, the package manager, and their requirements.

For the following instructions, it does not really matter which one is installed The instructions apply equally, as both ship with conda.

Channels

Third parties can build and distribute their own software via “channels”. These channels can be anywhere - be it a local file-system or a web-server -, but Anaconda.org conveniently provides an integrated platform to manage them. Astrorama has its own channel, and our software is there.

Channels need to be activated before any software from them is installed.

Packages can be “labeled”, and those with the main label are part of the main channel (say, astrorama). Any additional label needs to be explicitly enabled as an extra channel. As a convention, we use the develop label for packages that have not been released.

Our software has dependencies on packages shipped by Conda Forge so that channel must also be enabled.

In summary, to install software from Astrorama:

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conda config --add channels conda-forge
conda config --add channels astrorama

Only if you need software from the development branch:

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conda config --add channels astrorama/label/develop

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conda install --channel "astrorama" --channel "conda-forge" package

Installation

Once the channels have been configured, you may install any of our packages. They can be installed on the default environment - called base - but we strongly recommend to use a separate environment:

• It avoids conflicting or messing up dependencies
• It allows for easier uninstalling
• It allows to install multiple versions at the same time without conflicts, and switching easily between them

The first point is very important. The software may straight fail to run otherwise.

You can either create the environment first, activate second, and install third; but it is simpler, and less error-prone, to do the creation and installation at once:

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# -n defines the name of the environment!
conda create -n phz phosphoros
# Or
conda create -n phz -c astrorama -c astrorama/label/develop phosphoros
# Or, if you want a specific version
conda create -n phz -c astrorama -c astrorama/label/develop phosphoros==0.11

After this is done, you only need to activate the environment to use Phosphoros:

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conda activate phz
Phosphoros GUI

To remove the environment:

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# If the environment that you want to remove is active
conda deactivate
conda remove -n phz --all

Distributing

See Releases / Conda for information on how to build and distribute releases.