Manage packages and environments

Nebari uses conda-store for managing and sharing reproducible environments (collection of specific packages and versions) on the platform.

🔥warning

conda-store is the most reliable way to manage your packages and environments on Nebari.

Refrain from installing libraries directly in the notebook or through the terminal (outside a conda-store managed environment). These actions could lead to subtle and unforeseen problems with your environment.

Preliminary reading

It's useful to understand basics of conda-store and how it builds on top of the conda ecosystem, to use it effectively in Nebari.

• Essential conda concepts: Packages, environments, channels, dependencies, etc.
• conda-store concepts: Reproducibility, namespaces, environment versions, roles, etc.

Nebari has conda-store integrated, and you can use it through the graphical UI.

Open conda-store web interface

There are several options for navigating to conda-store:

• From Nebari Home, click on "Environment Management" under "Services"
• From JupyterLab, click on Nebari in the menu bar and go to "Environments"
• From anywhere, go to URL: https://<your-nebari-domain>/conda-store

If not logged in to conda-store, click on the "Log in" button in th left sidebar and authenticate similar to the Nebari login. This is required to be able to access many conda-store features.

Create, edit, and manage environments

Go through the following conda-store (UI) tutorials on using the graphical interface for various actions:

• Create new environments
• Edit & delete existing environments
• Switch environment versions

Default namespaces in Nebari

A default Nebari deployment/instance has the following namespaces corresponding to Nebari groups:

• analyst namespace - Users in the analyst group can view and admin group can view+edit the environments in this namespace
• developer namespace - Users in the developer and admin groups can view+edit the environments in this namespace
• nebari-git namespace - Everyone can view and admins can edit

As an individual user, you also have a personal namespace with the same name as your Nebari username.

ℹ️note

If you can "view" an environment, you can use it.

Select environments in editors

Instructions to select any environment you have access to in the following editing spaces:

• JupyterLab - In a Jupyter Notebook, click on the "Select Kernel" dropdown in the top-left corner, and select the environment.

• VS Code - Click on the ⚙️ icon in the bottom-right to open Settings -> Command Palette, and type "Python: Select Interpreter" and press Enter to get the list of environments to select from.

• Terminal - In the terminal window, you can use conda CLI commands like conda activate <namespace>-<environment_name> to activate the relevant environment and conda env list to view the list of available environments.

Special requirements

Dask

Include the nebari-dask metapackage in your environment to use Dask. This ensures you have the correct version of dask-gateway and the latest versions of dask and distributed libraries.

By default, the nebari-git-nebari-git-dask environment (available to everyone) can be used for basic Dask workflows.

JHub App Launcher

Include the jhub-apps package in your environment to create apps using the JHub App Launcher. You will also need the relevant app development framework and other necessary packages in the environment.