Conda ENV Setup

2021-01-23

I like to have my venv or conda environments as the child of my project’s root directory. I don’t like home directory storage. This means I use,No default packages is the default for conda create. But, explicit is better than implicit for me. The same applies to why I don’t use default packages in my .condarc.

conda create --prefix ./.conda --no-default-packages

which requires a,

echo ".conda/" >> .gitignore

and activatation via,

conda activate ./.conda

when in that directory.I also really don’t like scripts that auto-activate when you step in the directory. I’ve made more errors with those than without.

For most projects, I then need,

conda install \
numpy scipy pandas seaborn \
networkx sympy statsmodels \
jupyterlab dask

I don’t feel like doing this every time, so I keep templates in ~/Projects/templates/conda. Basically, I create individual folders in that directory as above, then run,

conda env export > environment.yml

so that later when I need a new project, I can do,

conda env create \
-f ~/Projects/templates/conda/datasci/environment.yml \
--prefix ./.conda

which I usually put as an alias in my ~/.zshrc,

alias create-datasci="conda env create \
-f ~/Projects/templates/conda/datasci/environment.yml \
--prefix ./.conda && \
echo ".conda/" >> .gitignore"

Finally, I don’t like the default command line PS1 (base) that conda does. It ends up showing the full path which takes up too much real estate so I do,

conda config --set env_prompt '({name}) '

I’d rather be able to use the parent directory name but the env_prompt template is just string format with three available variables: prefix, default_env, and name.