👋 Hey there!

Hidden in Conda’s documentation is this one little trick that help us build environments without having to solve the environment to speed up the deployment to production.

I didn’t include a challenge for this week’s newsletter, as I couldn’t think of one that was appropriate for this week’s newsletter 🤷

Here’s what’s in store for today:

• How to create a spec file for a Conda environment

• New tutorials, job postings, and interesting packages

• And much more…

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🥐 The Python Pantry

Curated links to help you become a better programmer

🎒 Tutorials
- Multithreading in Python, with an example
- Logging in Python – How to Use Logs to Debug Your Django Projects
- Running Python on air-gapped systems

📦️ Packages
- DataMapPlot: Create beautiful plots of data maps.
- Taipy: your data and AI full stack app builder
- Textual: Build sophisticated user interfaces in terminal.

💰️ Job Postings
- University of Michigan - Michigan Online, Software Engineer
- Six Feet Up - Senior Python Architect and Tech Lead

📕 Articles
- The Basics of Numpy Arrays
- Python Packaging, One Year Later: A Look Back at 2023 in Python Packaging
- [podcast] Measuring Bias, Toxicity, and Truthfulness in LLMs With Python

💡 This Week’s Snack

The weekly tip/trick for you to use right here, right now

Managing environments within a Python application can sometimes be a pain. You may use pip, Conda, or Poetry to help manage packages and dependencies.

» Fun fact: pip stands for “Pip Install Python”. Recursive acronyms, anyone?

In order for us to deploy to production, we need to re-build the conda environments. However, re-building an environment from the environment.yml file takes a very long time due to the “solving environment” step.

One alternative solution is to copy the folder where all of the packages are located, but we may run into symlink issues for packages such as Numpy and Astropy; this is something you don’t want to be debugging 😵‍💫

A better solution is to create a spec file. This is a file that explicitly states where the packages are coming from.

To create a spec file, run the command conda list --explicit >> spec.txt. The explicit flag will tell conda to create a specification file that looks like this:

However, there’s one major caveat: This only works if the operating system is the same. Notice on line 3 from the snippet above: platform: osx-64.

This means that this environment is specific to the MacOS-64bit platform, so it can’t be used for Linux or Windows.

📋️ How I Can Help

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