TCY

TsvtoCondaYml. A package for easy creation of conda .yml files using a .tsv file as input.

Aims

Using .yml files as recipes to create conda environments is already a good step towards reproducible scientific computing environments. However, sometimes we want to know why a particular package was included (or not), what it does (improving transparency), and whether it runs without errors on all common operating systems (Linux, Mac OS, Windows). Spreadsheet files offer much more possibilities to document this. The goal of this repository is to have the documentation capabilities of a .tsv file while also be able to export the packages that are described in it to a .yml file that can be interpreted by conda.

Use this repository for your own work

The most easy way to use tcy is to create your own repository by using this repository as a template. This has two advantages over using tcy locally on your machine:

1. Your spreadsheet files will be stored in a Github repository and are therefore available from any machine as long as you have an internet connection.
2. Creating environments can take a lot of time, depending on the number of packages that need to be included. Using the following approach, the computionally heavy solving process is outsourced to a Github-Runner so your personal machine can be used for other things. The Github-Runner will output solved environment specification files that you can use to quickly create your environment.

If you want to use this approach, then follow these steps:

1. Create your own repository by clicking on the Use this template button in the upper right.

2. Make sure to allow Github Runners to push changes to your repository by going to Settings → Actions → General → Workflow permissions → Checkmark "Read and write permissions"

3. Clone your repository to your local machine

4. Make local changes to environments/packages.tsv. See next section What goes into the packages.tsv file? on how to properly fill out this file.

5. Push your changes. This will start a Github-Action-Worfklow (that uses tcy and micromamba) to create .yml files with solved package specification solutions. Note that this workflow will also check if you filled out the file correctly by using (see Automatic testing of the packages.tsv file for more information). The workflow will automatically push the files to your repo, so wait until it's finished.

6. After the workflow has finished, pull the latest changes to your local repository.

7. Create your conda environment using either the ubuntu-latest_solved.yml or windows-latest_solved.yml file (depending on your OS) by doing this:

   • Set the name of the environment by overwriting the name: attribute in the .yml file.
   • After that execute the following command to create your environment: conda env create -f ubuntu_latest_solved.yml (or conda env create -f windows_latest_solved.yml) (Note: There is no need to specify -n environment_name in this command because the name of the environment was already specified in the first step. More information can be found here)

What goes into the packages.tsv file?

The input spreadsheet file must have the following columns:

• package_name : The offical name of the package.
• version : Can be empty, or specify the version of the package following the package match specification syntax.
• package_manager : Must be pip, conda, or cran.
• conda_channel : Can be empty in case the package manager is pip or cran but must contain the name of the conda channel to install from if conda is the package manager.
• necessity : Must be required, or optional.
• language : Must be python, r, or julia.
• bug_flag: Can be empty or linux, windows or cross_platform.

For developers

How to generate a custom .yml file using tcy

There are two ways to use tcy that both require the same installation using pip install tcy. After this you can use tcy as a python library or command-line application:

Using tcy as a python library

You can import the run function in your own code base using from tcy import run.

Using tcy as a command line application

As a command-line application: tcy can also be used as a command-line application by simply running tcy in the terminal.

The following positional arguments have to be specified:

• {linux,windows} (Operating system under which the .yml file will be used to create a conda environment. Can be 'linux' or 'windows'. Depending on the input only packages that run bug-free under the specified OS are selected. Packages that are flagged with cross-platform in the bug_flag column of the input .tsv file are never included.

The following optional arguments can be set for further customization:

• --yml_name (Sets the "name:" attribute of the .yml file. If not given, the .yml file will not have a "name:" attribute. This is useful if the file should only be used for updating an existing environment that already has a name, i.e. not to create a new one)
• --yml_file_name (Sets the name of the .yml file. The default is 'environment.yml')
• --pip_requirements_file (Write pip packages to a separate requirements.txt file. This will file will always be placed in the same directory as the .yml file)
• --write_conda_channels (Specifies conda channels directly for each conda package (e.g. conda-forge::spyder). In this case the 'defaults' channel is the only channel that appears in the 'channels:' section. See: this link for a preview)
• --tsv_path (Optional path to the .tsv file. If not given, the function will expect a "packages.tsv" file to be in the current working directory)
• --yml_dir(Path to a valid directory where the .yml file should be placed in. If not given the file will be placed in the current working directory. If a requirements.txt for pip is generated it will always be placed in the same directory as the .yml file)
• --cran_installation_script (If set, generates a bash script install_cran_packages.shthat allows to install CRAN-packages within the conda-environment. Only valid when --yml_name is set)
• --cran_mirror(A valid URL to a CRAN-Mirror where packages should be downloaded from. The default is https://cloud.r-project.org)
• --languages (Filter for certain languages. Valid inputs are 'python', 'r', 'julia' or 'all'. The default is 'all')
• --necessity (Filter for necessity. Valid inputs are 'optional' and 'required').

Automatic testing of the packages.tsv file

This repository includes a testing pipeline that checks for the integrity of / valid entries in the packages.tsv. Which tests are running is decided using the test_configs.json file. Each tests corresponds to a key within the json file. If the corresponding value is null the test is not being executed. Here's an explanation of each test and rules for how the values should be provided in case the test should be executed.

key	value	description
valid_columns	list of column names	tsv file must only have these columns in that specific order
filled_out_columns	list of column names	cells in these columns must not contain NaNs, i.e. every row within these columns must contain a value
valid_options	dict with column names as keys and list of valid options as values	cells in these columns must only contain these values
column_dependencies	dict with column names as keys and list of other columns as values	if a cell in this column is filled out, cells in this/these other column(s) also to be filled out
conditional_column_dependencies	dict of dict of lists	if a cell in this column has this value, cells in this/these other column(s) have to be filled out
multi_option_columns	dict with column names as keys and list of valid options as values	cells in these columns must only contain valid options separated by commas

CRAN-packages

EDIT: Still in development! Some R-packages are not (yet) available as conda-packages. In order to semi-automate the installation process of these packages in your conda environment, run install_cran_packages.sh. This script will activate the conda environment, start R in this environment and then install the CRAN-packages via install.packages() Note that this is not the recommended way to do it, but some R-packages are simply not available as conda-packages (this should be checked though on a regular basis).

Q & A

What about dependencies?

It's not necesary to specifiy dependencies in the .tsv file! Conda will take care of that. So for example, there's no need to put numpy in the .tsv file because numpy is a common dependency of most scientific python packages (e.g. scikit-learn,pytorch, etc.) There might however be cases where there are optional dependencies that can but do not have to be installed (Example: The plotting package plotly works completely fine if we install it as it is. But if we want the nice feature of creating interactive plots we also have to install the dependency orca).

Why not create the environment and share the exported .yml file?

Theoretically there would be an even better option than everyone creating the same environment over and over: The environment should be only created once (which can take a long time because conda has to resolve a dependency graph where each of the packages is ‘happy’ with the versions of all other packages). Then this environment could be exported via conda env export > environment.yml . Finally, other users could then take this .yml file to create the environment without the need to resolve the dependency graph one more time, because this file already contains the ‘solution’. More information on that can be found here.

But here comes the catch: This file will probably not work across operating systems and their versions (e.g. your own personal laptop which might run on Windows vs. your server which runs on Linux). The reason for that is, that complex dependency graphs contain packages that are only available for a specific OS/OS-version.

The longterm solution for this problem is to create a containerized solution that includes a conda environment as aimed in csp_docker