conda-stage: Stage Conda Environment on Local Disk

The conda-stage tool takes the active conda environment and stage it to local disk. Working with a conda environment on local disk can greatly improve the performance as local disk is often much faster than a global, network-based file system, including multi-tenant parallel file systems such as BeeGFS and Lustre often found in high-performance compute (HPC) environments.

Setup

Call the following once per shell session:

$ eval $(conda-stage --source)

This will create shell function conda-stage().

Examples

Example: Configure environment for automatic staging

To configure existing Conda environment 'myenv' so that it is automatically staged to local disk when activated, and automatically unstaged when deactivated, do:

$ conda activate myenv
(myenv) $ conda-stage --auto-stage=enable
(myenv) $ conda deactivate
$ 

This configuration is only needed to be done once per environment.

Now, whenever activating this environment in the future, it will be automatically staged;

$ conda activate myenv
(/tmp/alice/conda-stage-ktdy/myenv) $ command -v python
/tmp/hb/conda-stage-ktdy/myenv/bin/python

When deactivate, all temporarily files will be removed automatically;

(/tmp/alice/conda-stage-ktdy/myenv) $ conda deactivate
INFO: Unstaging and reverting to original Conda environment  ...
INFO: Preparing removal of staged files: /tmp/hb/conda-stage-ktdy/myenv
INFO: Deactivating and removing staged Conda environment: /tmp/hb/conda-stage-ktdy/myenv
INFO: Total unstage time: 0 seconds
$ 

To temporarily disable automatic staging, set environment variable CONDA_STAGE=false before activation, e.g.

$ export CONDA_STAGE=false
$ conda activate myenv
(myenv) $ 

This can be useful when you want to update the Conda environment, or install additional software, because that cannot be done to staged environment;

$ export CONDA_STAGE=false
$ conda activate myenv
(myenv) $ conda update --all
(myenv) $ conda-stage --pack --force
(myenv) $ conda deactivate
$ unset CONDA_STAGE
$

We call conda-stage --pack --force to make sure the updated are reflected in the cached "tarball" that is used for staging.

It is also necessary if you want to disable auto-staging;

$ export CONDA_STAGE=false
$ conda activate myenv
(myenv) $ conda-stage --auto-stage=disable
(myenv) $ conda deactivate
$ unset CONDA_STAGE

Example: Manual staging and unstaging of environments

To stage conda environment 'myenv' to local disk and activate there, do:

$ conda activate myenv
(myenv) $ which python
/home/alice/.conda/envs/myenv/bin/python
(myenv) $ conda-stage --stage --quiet
(myenv*) $ which python
/tmp/alice/conda-stage-VlQr/myenv/bin/python

To unstage, that is, reactivate the original environment 'myenv' and remove all staged files, do:

(myenv*) $ conda-stage --unstage --quiet
(myenv) $ which python
/home/alice/.conda/envs/myenv/bin/python
(myenv) $ conda deactivate
$ 

For further help, call:

$ conda-stage --help

Known limitations

• An already staged Conda environment cannot be staged, cf.

• RPATH (= run-time search path) in binaries are not rewritten/relocated by conda-pack by staging, cf. conda/conda-pack#117. This means that those binaries will still access the original files as pointed to by RPATH. This will not break anything.

Requirements

• Bash

• conda, e.g. Miniconda (~400 MB disk space) or Anaconda (~3 TB disk space). Commands conda activate ... and conda deactivate only works in conda (>= 4.6) [2019-01-15].

All heavy lifting is done by conda-pack, which is a tool for packaging and distributing conda environments. If not already installed, it will be installed into the active environment before that is staged to local disk.

Installation

$ cd /path/to/software
$ curl -L -O https://github.com/HenrikBengtsson/conda-stage/archive/refs/tags/0.7.1.tar.gz
$ tar xf 0.7.1.tar.gz
$ PATH=/path/to/conda-stage-0.7.1/bin:$PATH
$ export PATH
$ conda-stage --version
0.7.1