conda_lockfile

conda_lockfile manages the life cycle of a production application's conda environment.

The intention is to allow developers to manage their requirements at a relatively high level, while also being able to freeze these requirements & ensuring that the same environment always gets created. This is heavily influenced by Cargo's Cargo.toml and Cargo.lock workflow, and in spirit with poetry.

The expected workflow is (blue):

1. Define a deps.yml file.
2. Freeze (conda lockfile freeze) these requirements into a deps.yml.{platform}.lock file.
3. Create (conda lockfile create) an environment from the lockfile.

It is the nature of dependencies to evolve, so there are commands for verifying that your dependencies are in sync with your lockfiles and created environments (green).

1. The depsfile and lockfile are in sync (conda lockfile checklocks).
2. The depsfile and created environment are in sync (conda lockfile checkenv).

When dependencies change, deps.yml should be updated and the lock files re-generated.

deps.yml

The cycle starts with a deps.yml file (a conda environment file) that specifies the application environment's dependencies. This should be as loose as possible and only specified the packages and versions that you specifically want to manage. The standard name for this file is deps.yml

conda lockfile freeze

From this high level description of dependencies, conda_lockfile will generate a detailed, comprehensive list of dependencies. ie a lockfile. This file is immune to dependencies publishing updated versions. So long as your project uses this lockfile the environment will be exactly the same. The standard name for this file is `deps.yml.{platform}.lock. This file will generally be checked into source control.

conda lockfile create

From the lockfile, conda_lockfile can create an environment. This is a thin wrapper around conda env create plus some additional metadata to verify the provenance of the lockfile/environment.

conda lockfile checkenv

Verifies that deps.yml and installed environment "match". It does this by embedding a hash of deps.yml and stashing that within the environment created from deps.yml.{platform}.lock. This is primarily useful for development & quickly detecting changes to deps.yml that invalidate the existing environment.

conda lockfile checklocks

Verifies that your lockfiles deps.yml.{Linux|Darwin}.lock are in sync with your deps.yml files.