Development Conda Environment

As a developer, if you want to build the documentation locally or lint the code, you will need your own conda environment with the necessary packages.

Installing Miniforge3

If you have not already done so, you will install Miniforge3:

curl -L -O "https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge/releases/latest/download/Miniforge3-$(uname)-$(uname -m).sh"
bash Miniforge3-$(uname)-$(uname -m).sh

If you have the space to do so, we recommend installing Miniforge3 somewhere in our home directory. Typically, this file system will be faster than on a scratch space spaces. Also, a conda environment will be rendered useless if its contents get purged. However, conda environments each require several GB of space, which may quickly use up your disk quota so you will need to weigh these trade-offs for yourself.

In what follows, we assume you have Miniforge3 installed in ${HOME}/miniforge3.

You may wish to skip the step in the Miniforge3 installation where it wants to modify your .bashrc. If you allow it to, it will add activation of the conda command and the base conda environment, and this may not be something you want.

If you opt not to allow Miniforge3 to update your .bashrc, it may be helpful to add an alias like the following to your .bashrc:

alias conda_base='
source ${HOME}/miniforge3/etc/profile.d/conda.sh
conda activate'

Anytime you need conda command, you can first run conda_baseto get it.

Creating the Conda Environment

With Miniforge3 installed and the conda command available, you can create the Omega development environment, starting from the root of an Omega branch, with:

cd components/omega/
conda create -n omega_dev --file dev-conda.txt
conda activate omega_dev

Updating the Conda Environment

If you need to update the omega_dev conda environment, the easiest way to do that is just to recreate it by following the same instructions as above. You will be prompted about whether you want to delete the old environment unless you include the -y flag (to say “yes” to all prompts).