conda VS pip-tools

Python's venv module is officially recommended for creating virtual environments since Python 3.5 comes packaged with your Python installation. While there still are additional older tools available, such as conda and virtualenv, if you are new to virtual environments, it is best to use venv now.

conda's dependency solver solves a harder problem than pip's. This quote alludes to it "Conda will never be as fast as pip, so long as we're doing real environment solves and pip satisfies itself only for the current operation." (from https://github.com/conda/conda/issues/7239). Thus mamba was created to improve performance and now conda is bringing in that performance boost.

The other challenge I ran into sometimes was that if I was running a lower memory/storage Codespace instance, when I tried to use Conda from the command line to modify environments, the process would be killed after a few seconds. This turns out to be related to some performance issues Conda has that make it consume a lot of memory when trying to work with the conda-forge installation channel. You can always then just increase the size of the Codespace your are working with (just go to your Codespaces list and use the triple dots to change the settings for a Codespace).

It's worth noting that [ana]conda isn't even fully compatible yet with 3.11 (you can use it to create 3.11 environments--and you really should rather than waiting on relying on the system python--but conda itself can only run on 3.10.

It took some time but as great Christmas present Miniconda was finally released with Python 3.10!

The September update broke it.

According to this this issue is high on their priority list (whatever that means).

> Why is the "requirements.txt" file a stupid flat listing of all transitive dependencies with pinned versions? It makes it harder to change library versions even if there are no true conflicts.

My friend, here is what you seek: https://github.com/jazzband/pip-tools

requirements.txt is flat because it's really the output of `pip freeze`. It's supposed to completely and exactly rebuild the environment. Unfortunately it's far too flexible and people abuse it by putting in only direct dependencies etc.

If you're writing packages, you don't need a requirements.txt at all, by the way. Package dependencies (only direct dependencies) live in pyproject.toml with the rest of the package config. requirements.txt (and pip tools) are only for when you want to freeze the whole environment, like for a server deployment.

For all my projects I found myself regenerating manual lock files using complex shell commands with pip-compile to get a reproducible environments across devices using a custom pre-install-command. I finally decided that instead of hacking together the same solution on all my projects I would build a plugin that handles this complexity for me.

Instead of venv, we are using pip-tools in this starter kit. pip-tools take things further in dependency management. Check out what pip-tools does in their official GitHub repo. In short, it helps your project find the best match for the dependent packages. For example, you might need two packages A and B in your project that requires same package C under the hood. But A requires any version of C from 1.0.1 to 1.0.10 and B requires any version of C from 1.0.7 to 1.0.15. Pip tools will automatically compile the version of 'C' that suits for both of your packages.

I've created a small project called just-pip-tools that combines pip-tools and just to manage Python dependencies in a layered approach. This isn't a magic bullet; it's a set of files you can adapt to your needs.

For small projects I recommend pip-tools. Just write packet list in requirements.in and pip-compile compile a requirements.txt with comments.

Take a look at pip-tools, great package. https://github.com/jazzband/pip-tools

pip-tools

I recommend generating a lockfile to document this information, as you might do with pip-tools.

Check out pip-tools [1] which does exactly that, albeit in a slightly more polished way.

[1]: https://github.com/jazzband/pip-tools