Intro to conda — Anaconda Enterprise 4.4 documentation

Anaconda Enterprise: Documentation

# Intro to conda

Package, dependency and environment management for any language: Python, R, Scala, Java, Javascript, C/ C++, FORTRAN

Conda is a package manager application that quickly installs, runs, and updates packages and their dependencies. The conda command is the primary interface for managing installations of various packages. It can query and search the package index and current installation, create new environments, and install and update packages into existing conda environments. See our Using conda section for more information.

Conda is also an environment manager application. A conda environment is a directory that contains a specific collection of conda packages that you have installed. For example, you may have one environment with NumPy 1.7 and its dependencies, and another environment with NumPy 1.6 for legacy testing. If you change one environment, your other environments are not affected. You can easily activate or deactivate (switch between) these environments. You can also share your environment with someone by giving them a copy of your environment.yaml file.

SEE ALSO: Managing environments.

A conda package is a compressed tarball file that contains system-level libraries, Python or other modules, executable programs, or other components. Conda keeps track of the dependencies between packages and platforms.

Conda packages are downloaded from remote channels, which are simply URLs to directories containing conda packages. The conda command searches a default set of channels, and packages are automatically downloaded and updated from http://repo.continuum.io/pkgs/.

SEE ALSO: Managing packages.

Users may modify what remote channels are automatically searched, for example, if they wish to maintain a private or internal channel (see Configuration for details).

The conda build command creates new packages that can be optionally uploaded to a repository such as PyPi, GitHub, or Anaconda.org.

SEE ALSO: Building packages and Glossary.