warning :: unmaintained

ATM conda metachannel is unmaintained. The service that conda-forge ran has been shut down due to hosting costs.

It should still work if you are deploying it on your own infrastructure.

If you are looking for a conda is slow solution

Try using mamba

conda-metachannel

This is a small little web application to behave like a conda channel but with user-specified constraints.

By doing this you can add a small conda channel that has a limited number of packages.

There is a hosted version of metachannel provided at https://metachannel.conda-forge.org

https://metachannel.conda-forge.org/conda-forge/pandas,ipython,scikit-learn

This is a channel that contains pandas, ipython and scikit-learn (and all of their dependencies), and nothing else.

Recommended usage with conda-forge

Presently metachannel is best used when creating new environments. For example

conda create --override-channels \
      -c https://metachannel.conda-forge.org/defaults,conda-forge/pandas \
      'pandas>=0.24' 

This will function similarly to strict channel priority in conda, except it will fuse the channels remotely and constrain the list of packages to be those that pandas requires to be installed.

Advanced features

--max-build-no

Adding this to the constraint clause will filter out outdated builds from the graph. This is typically what most users actually want to run.

e.g.

$ conda search --override-channels \
      -c https://metachannel.conda-forge.org/conda-forge/python \
      'python=3.6.1'

python                    3.6.1               0  conda-forge/python
python                    3.6.1               1  conda-forge/python
python                    3.6.1               2  conda-forge/python
python                    3.6.1               3  conda-forge/python

$ conda search --override-channels \
      -c http://<HOSTNAME>/conda-forge/python,--max-build-no 'python=3.6.1'

python                    3.6.1               3  conda-forge/python,--max-build-no

channel fusing

You can fuse two or more channels together.

https://metachannel.conda-forge.org/<CHANNELA>,<CHANNELB>/<CONSTRAINTS>

This will function like a composite of these two channels. Packages that exist in channel B will supercede those in channel A for ALL versions (just like strict channel priority).

Channels that contain non-urlsafe characters need to be url-escaped

e.g.

$ conda search --override-channels -c https://metachannel.conda-forge.org/conda-forge,conda-forge%2Flabel%2Fgcc7/--max-build-no 'pandas'

pandas    0.23.4 py27h1702cab_1000  conda-forge,conda-forge%2Flabel%2Fgcc7/--max-build-no
pandas    0.23.4 py36h1702cab_1000  conda-forge,conda-forge%2Flabel%2Fgcc7/--max-build-no
pandas    0.23.4 py37h1702cab_1000  conda-forge,conda-forge%2Flabel%2Fgcc7/--max-build-no

blacklists

conda-metachannel has the ability to apply package blacklists. These need to be present as blacklists/<channel>/<name>.yml

$ conda search --override-channels -c https://metachannel.conda-forge.org/conda-forge/--blacklist=abi python

The default blacklist that ships with conda-metachannel is one that removes all potential abi incompatible packages resulting from the compiler switchover from conda-forge.