Conda-Vendor
Conda Vendor is a tool to create local conda channels and manifests for vendored deployments
Installation
To install with pip, run:
pip install conda-vendor
Usage
Conda-vendor has two main steps to create a local channel. First, a meta-manifest file is created as an intermediate artifact. With an existing meta-manifest file, a local conda channel can then be created.
The intermediate meta-manifest is generated to allow for the creation of custom software manifests. These manifests can then be used obtain package approval from an organization's cybersecurity team.
Creating a Meta-manifest
Conda-vendor solves an environment with conda from an environment.yaml
and determines all the packages that are required. The metadata for these required packages is stored in a file called meta_manifest.yaml
. To create this file, run:
conda vendor create-meta-manifest --environment-yaml environment.yaml
The above command will output a meta_manifest.yaml
file in the current directory.
Creating a Local Channel
With a meta-manifest file created, conda-vendor can then create local channels.
conda vendor create-channels --meta-manifest-path ./meta_manifest.yaml
This will create a directory called local_channel
that will contain the same number of channels as were listed in the original environment.yaml
file. These local channels will only contain the packages that are needed to satisfy the solved environment from the create-meta-manifest
step.
Using the Local channel
There are several ways to use the local channel. If python was in the input environment.yaml
file for example, the following could be used:
conda create -n test_env python -c <path_to_local_channel> --offline
The --offline
flag will prevent conda from reaching out to the internet for packages. To verify that the environment created only contains packages contained in the local channel, run the following:
conda activate test_env
conda list --explicit
This should show a list of all the packages in the environment the local paths to their source code (typically tar.bz2 files).
Creating Environment with all Packages from Input Environment.yaml
To generate a conda environment yaml that contains all the packages from the input environment.yaml
, run the following:
conda vendor create-local-yaml --meta-manifest-path ./meta_manifest.yaml --channel-root <absolute_path_to_local_channel_dir>
This will create a environment file inside the local_channel
directory called local_conda-vendor-env.yaml
. An environment can then be created with:
conda env create -f local_channel/local_conda-vendor-env.yaml
The environment will be created with the packages that are contained in the local channel.
Creating a Custom Manifest for Package Security Validation
The following functionality is only applicable if there is an organization that requires a list of packages for security validation. Currently the Iron Bank format is supported, but support for other formats can be added to the source code in custom_manifest.py
.
To generate an iron bank manifest from the meta-manifest, run:
conda vendor create-custom-manifest --meta-manifest-path ./meta-manifest.yaml --output-manifest-path ./custom_manifest.yaml
This will output a manifest file in the Iron Bank format.