Some notes on building a conda recipe

I’ve spent the day building a conda recipe, the process wasn’t super-smooth, hopefully these notes will help others and/or maybe you can leave me a comment to improve my flow. The goal was to learn how to use conda to distribute a package that ordinarily I’d put on PyPI .

I’m using linux 64bit (Mint 18 on an XPS 9550), conda 4.1 and conda build 1.21.14 (up to date as of today). My goal was to build a recipe ( python_template_with_config_recipe ) to install my python_template_with_config (a bit of boilerplate code I use sometimes when making a new project). That template has two modules, a test, a setup.py and it depends on numpy.

The short story:

git clone https://github.com/ianozsvald/python_template_with_config_recipe.git cd inside, run “conda build debug .” # note the period means “current directory” and that’s two dashes debug a local bzip will be built and you’ll see that the 1 test ran ok

On my machine the built code ends up in “~/anaconda3/pkgs/python_template_with_config-0.1-py35_0/lib/python3.5/site-packages/python_template_with_config” and the building takes place in “~/anaconda3/conda-bld/linux-64”.

In a new conda environment I can use “conda install use-local python_template_with_config” and it’ll install the built recipe into the new environment.

To get started with this I first made a fresh empty conda environment (note that anaconda isn’t my default Python, hence the long-form access to `conda`):

$ ~/anaconda3/bin/conda create -n new_recipe_env python=3.5 $ . ~/anaconda3/bin/activate new_recipe_env

To check that my existing “setup.py” runs I use pip to install from git, we’ll need the setup.py in the conda recipe later so we want to confirm that it works:

$ pip install git+https://github.com/ianozsvald/python_template_with_config.git # runs setup.py # $ pip uninstall python_template_with_config # use this if you need to uninstall whilst developing

I can check that this has installed as a module using:

In [1]: from python_template_with_config import another_module
In [2]: another_module.a_math_function()
# silly function just to check that numpy is installed
Out[2]: -2.4492935982947064e-16

Now I’ll make a second conda environment to develop the recipe:

$ ~/anaconda3/bin/conda create -n new_recipe_env2 python=3.5 # vanilla environment, no numpy $ . ~/anaconda3/bin/activate new_recipe_env2 git clone https://github.com/ianozsvald/python_template_with_config_recipe.git cd inside, run "conda build --debug ."

The recipe (meta.yaml) will look at the git repo for python_template_with_config, pull down a copy, build using build.sh and the store a bzip2 archive locally. The build step also notes that I can upload this to Anaconda using `$ anaconda upload /home/ian/anaconda3/conda-bld/linux-64/python_template_with_config-0.1-py35_0.tar.bz2`.

A few caveats occurred whilst creating the recipe:

You need a bld.bat, build.sh, meta.yaml, at first I created bld.sh and meta.yml (both typos) and there were no complaints…just frustration on my part the first clue was seeing “source tree in: /home/ian/anaconda3/conda-bld/work \n number of files: 0” in the build output When running conda build it seems to not overwrite the version in ~/anaconda3/pkgs/ I ended up deleting “python_template_with_config-0.1-py35_0/” and “python_template_with_config-0.1-py35_0.tar.bz2” by hand just to make sure on each build iteration I must be missing something here, please enlighten me Having deleted the cached versions and fixed the typos I’d later see “number of files: 14” Later I added “run_tests.py” rather than “run_test.py”, I knew it wasn’t running as I’d added a “1/0” line inside run_tests.py that obviously wasn’t running (it should raise a ZeroDivisionError even if the tests did run ok). Again this was a typo on my part The above is tested on Linux, it ought to work on windows but I’ve not tested it This meta.yaml installs from github, there’s a commented out line in there showing how to access the local source files instead

I didn’t get as far as uploading this to Anaconda to make it ‘public’ (as I don’t think that’s so useful) but I believe that final step is easy enough.

Useful docs:

conda recipe tutorial meta.yaml specification Notes on laying out a Python package (as a precursor to making a setup.py file) In my recipe in github I’ve added a set of useful links in the meta.yaml and run_tests.py Ian applies Data Science as an AI/Data Scientist for companies inModelInsight, sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London . Historically Ian ran Mor Consulting . He also founded the image and text annotation API Annotate.io , co-authored SocialTies , programs Python, authored The Screencasting Handbook

, lives in London and is a consumer of fine coffees.