Building a conda package

You can build a conda package to bundle software files and information about the software—such as its name, specific version and description—into a single file that can be easily installed and managed.

Building a conda package requires installing conda build and creating a conda build recipe. You then use the conda build command to build the conda package from the conda recipe.

Tip

If you are new to building packages with conda, here are some video tutorials that you may find helpful:

• Production-grade Packaging with Anaconda | AnacondaCon 2018

  This 41-minute presentation by Mahmoud Hashemi covers using conda and conda environments to build an OS package (RPM) and Docker images.

• The Sheer Joy of Packaging | SciPy 2018 Tutorial

  This 210-minute presentation by Michael Sarahan, Filipe Fernandes, Chris Barker, Matt Craig, Matt McCormick, Jean-Christophe Fillion-Robin, Jonathan Helmus, and Ray Donnelly provides end-to-end examples of packaging with PyPI and conda. You can find materials from the tutorial here.

• Making packages and packaging “just work” | PyData 2017 Tutorial

  This 40-minute presentation by Michael Sarahan walks you through critical topics such as the anatomy of a Python package, tools available to make packaging easier, plus how to automate builds and why you might want to do so.

You can build conda packages from a variety of source code projects, most notably Python. For help packaging a Python project, see the Setuptools documentation.

Note

Setuptools is a package development process library designed to facilitate packaging Python projects, and is not part of Anaconda, Inc. Conda-build uses the build system that’s native to the language, so in the case of Python that’s setuptools.

After you build the package, you can upload it to a channel for others to access.