Welcome to conda-package-handling’s documentation!

conda-package-handling is a library and command line utility used to handle .conda and .tar.bz2 conda packages.

conda and conda-build use conda_package_handling.api to create and extract conda packages. This package also provides the cph command line tool to extract, create, and convert between formats.

See also conda-package-streaming

A new major version

As of version 2.x, conda-package-handling provides a backwards-compatible wrapper around conda-package-streaming, plus additional package creation functionality not found in conda-package-streaming. conda-package-handling always expects to read and write to the filesystem. If you need a simpler API to extract or inspect conda packages, check out conda-package-streaming.

Version 2.x is approximately two times faster extracting .conda packages, by extracting .conda’s embedded .tar.zst without first writing it to a temporary file. It uses python-zstandard and the Python standard library instead of a custom libarchive and so is easier to build. Extraction does not chdir to the output directory, and is thread-safe.

Version 2.x creates .conda packages slightly differently as well.

• .conda’s info- archive comes after the pkg- archive.

• Inside .conda, the info- and pkg-‘s ZIP metadata use a fixed timestamp, instead of the current time - can be seen with python -m zipfile -l [filename].conda.

• .conda’s embedded .tar.zst strip uid/gid/username/groupname instead of preserving these from the filesystem.

• Both .conda and .tar.bz2 are created by Python’s standard zipfile and tarfile instead of libarchive.

No particular attention has been paid to archiving time which will be dominated by the compression algorithm, but this also avoids using a temporary .tar.zst.

Overview

There are two conda formats. The new conda format, described at .conda file format, consists of an outer, uncompressed ZIP-format container, with 2 inner compressed .tar files. It is designed to have much faster metadata access and utilize more modern compression algorithms. The old conda format is a .tar.bz2 archive.

The cph command line tool can transmute (convert) the old package format to the new one, and vice versa.

cph transmute mkl-2018.0.3-1.tar.bz2 .conda

The new package format is an indexed, uncompressed zip file that contains two Zstandard-compressed tarfiles. The info metadata about packages is separated into its own tarfile from the rest of the package contents. By doing this, we can extract only the metadata, for speeding up operations like indexing.

And, the Zstandard algorithm is much, much faster to decompress than bz2.

Package creation is primarily something that conda-build uses, as cph only packages but does not create metadata that makes a conda package useful.

cph create /path/to/some/dir my-cute-archive.conda

This would not necessarily create a valid conda package, unless the directory being archived contained all the metadata in an “info” directory that a standard conda package needs. The .conda file it creates, however, uses all the nice new compression formats, though, and you could use cph on some other computer to extract it.

Development

Install this package and its test dependencies; run tests.

pip install -e ".[test]"
pytest

Contents

• conda_package_handling
  • cph utility
  • api module
• Changelog
  • 2.4.0 (2024-10-08)
  • 2.3.0 (2024-06-05)
  • 2.2.0 (2023-07-28)
  • 2.1.0 (2023-05-04)
  • 2.0.2 (2022-12-01)
  • 2.0.1 (2022-11-18)
  • 2.0.0 (2022-11-17)
  • 1.9.0 (2022-09-06)
  • 1.8.1 (2022-04-01)
  • 1.8.0 (2022-03-12)
  • 1.7.3 (2021-04-12)
  • 1.7.2 (2020-10-16)
  • 1.6.0 (2019-09-20)
  • 1.5.0 (2019-08-31)
  • 1.4.1 (2019-08-04)
  • 1.4.0 (2019-08-02)
  • 1.3.11 (2019-07-11)
  • 1.3.10 (2019-06-24)
  • 1.3.9 (2019-06-14)
  • 1.3.8 (2019-06-13)
  • 1.3.7 (2019-06-12)
  • 1.3.6 (2019-06-12)
  • 1.3.5 (2019-06-12)
  • 1.3.4 (2019-06-11)
  • 1.3.3 (2019-06-11)
  • 1.3.2 (2019-06-11)
  • 1.3.1 (2019-06-11)
  • 1.3.0 (2019-06-10)
  • 1.2.0 (2019-06-08)
  • 1.1.5 (2019-05-21)
  • 1.1.4 (2019-05-21)
  • 1.1.3 (2019-05-20)
  • 1.1.2 (2019-05-20)
  • 1.1.1 (2019-05-14)
  • 1.1.0 (2019-05-10)
  • 1.0.4 (2019-02-13)
  • 1.0.3 (2019-02-04)
  • 1.0.2 (2019-02-04)
  • 1.0.1 (2019-02-04)

Indices and tables

• Index

• Module Index

• Search Page