monstructor, a stand-alone installer generator based on mamba

Note: very early stage software

Monstructor generates standalone installers (similar to constructor for conda) that uses conda packages and the C++ of mamba to install the packages.

The monstructor project is currently a Work-In-Progress. The current idea is to have a installer layout (for Linux) that looks like the following:

• monstructor binary
• JSON description of payload (list of repodata snippets including channel, URL, SHA256, file size)
• concatenated binary tar.bz2 or .conda files

Usage

To use the monstructor, you have to have a conda environment. Currently, mamba needs to be installed from source (but with mamba 0.5.4 it will be enough to have libmamba-static installed!).

First, build monstructor:

• mkdir build && cd build
• cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$CONDA_PREFIX
• make -j4

With the monstructor binary in place, you can generate new monstructors. For this, run the python script included in example. First, select (or create) an environment, and export it:

• mamba create -n xtensor xtensor -c conda-forge
• conda activate xtensor
• mamba list --json > exported_pkgs.json
• python examples/test.py build/monstructor ./exported_pkgs.json

This will place a new, bundled executable into the build folder (monstructor.done). You can execute this file:

• ./build/monstructor.done -p /some/target/prefix

To recreate the environment you previously exported.