Quickly Replicating Your Anaconda Environment

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.

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