Conda ecosystem

Conda is a language-agnostic, multi-platform package management ecosystem. conda-forge is a community-led infrastructure to build and distribute packages. These projects are very convenient to install and use packages on different platforms. We will use the Conda ecosystem via two projects: Miniforge and Pixi.

Important

We advise to avoid the historical Anaconda distribution which can lead to technical and legal problems. If it is installed on your computer, it is a good idea to uninstall it and use alternative solutions.

Note

In practice, we will try during this training to use Pixi rather that conda, since this is overall a better and more modern tool. However, it is still useful to have conda and mamba installed since many examples on the web use these programs.

Miniforge

Miniforge is a modified version of Miniconda using by default the community driven conda-forge channel. Install it following the instructions presented in this page. Miniforge provides the command line applications conda and mamba, so you should be able to run

conda --version
mamba --version

Pixi

Pixi is a modern package management tool for developers based on conda ecosystem. Install it following instructions given here: https://pixi.sh/latest/#installation.

Pixi can be used for example to globally install applications, for example IPython with few common packages:

pixi global install ipython --with matplotlib --with pandas