Introduction to Conda for (Data) Scientists: Glossary

Conda is a platform agnostic, open source package and environment management system.

Using a package and environment management tool facilitates portability and reproducibility of (data) science workflows.

Conda solves both the package and environment management problems and targets multiple programming languages. Other open source tools solve either one or the other, or target only a particular programming language.

Anaconda is not only for Python

A Conda environment is a directory that contains a specific collection of Conda packages that you have installed.

You create (remove) a new environment using the conda create (conda remove) commands.

You activate (deactivate) an environment using the conda activate (conda deactivate) commands.

You install packages into environments using conda install; you install packages into an active environment using pip install.

You should install each environment as a sub-directory inside its corresponding project directory

Use the conda env list command to list existing environments and their respective locations.

Use the conda list command to list all of the packages installed in an environment.

A package is a tarball containing system-level libraries, Python or other modules, executable programs and other components, and associated metadata.

A Conda channel is a URL to a directory containing a Conda package(s).

You can specific a conda channel using the option --channel or add it to your .condarc

If a python package isn’t available on a conda channel you can install it into your environment using the python package installer pip.

Sharing Conda environments with other researchers facilitates the reproducibility of your research.

Conda environment files ,environment.yml, describes your project’s software environment.

The .condarc is an optional configuration file that stores custom conda setting.

You can use the conda config subcommand to add, set or remove configuration setting in the .condarc file.

You can also edit the contents of the .condarc file directly using a text editor.