Shared Conda Environments - UC Berkeley Data Science Curriculum Guide

Shared conda environments let instructors and TAs install custom packages and register new Jupyter kernels for their courses, without needing GitHub pull requests or waiting for the new software to be deployed. This is useful for quickly adding or updating software needed for teaching or assignments, providing autonomy to instructors in making quick changes to the instructional environment.

Creating additional conda environments also helps avoid dependency problems: you can install software into a secondary environment that might otherwise break the base environment, keeping your course setup stable and isolated.

If you are interested in piloting this feature in your hub, we encourage you to contact the DataHub team for more information and to express your interest.

Technical Details¶

The software is deployed on the shared cloud file server, not within the hub’s singleuser docker image, so changes to secondary conda environments do not require that the docker image be rebuilt and deployed. Students might only need to restart their notebook servers to see newly installed kernels, and package updates would require that students restart running kernels.

Create a Conda Environment¶

Open a terminal from Jupyterlab and run:
```
conda init
```
If you see the “No action taken” error, run:
```
source ~/.bashrc
```
Create a conda environment from scratch
```
conda create --prefix /srv/conda/envs/shared python=3.11 -y
```
You can create a conda environment from the ‘notebook’ conda environment if ‘notebook’ exists. You can check if notebook exists by running conda env list.
```
conda list --explicit --prefix /srv/conda/envs/notebook > base-env.txt
conda create --prefix /srv/conda/envs/shared --file base-env.txt
```
You can also create a conda environment from the base conda environment:
```
conda list --explicit --prefix /srv/conda > base-env.txt
conda create --prefix /srv/conda/envs/shared --file base-env.txt
```
Tip
Conda dependency resolution can be memory-intensive, especially when installing multiple or complex packages. We recommend temporarily increasing memory resources for instructor or TA pods when setting up shared environments.
Activate the new environment to start working in it.
```
conda activate /srv/conda/envs/shared
```
Install any additional packages you need for the course.
```
mamba install numpy pandas -y
```
If mamba is not available, use conda install ... instead. mamba is a faster drop-in replacement for conda.
Install ipykernel if not already installed.
```
mamba install ipykernel -y
```
Install a kernel that uses your new conda environment.
```
python -m ipykernel install \
    --name shared \
    --display-name "Python (<bcourse_id or whatever you want>)" \
    --prefix /srv/conda/envs/shared
```
Note
Registering a kernel makes it available in the Jupyter interface for you and your students. --name is the internal kernel identifier, and --display-name is what users will see in the Jupyter UI.
Validate that the kernel was successfully registered.
```
jupyter kernelspec list
```
This will display all available Jupyter kernels.
Optionally deactivate the environment once setup is complete. This is only necessary if you want your running terminal to have access to the original environment.
```
conda deactivate
```

Remove a Conda Environment¶

To remove the conda environment, run:

conda env remove --prefix /srv/conda/envs/shared

This frees up disk space on the shared file server.