Environment management with Conda¶

Briefcase is able to use Conda to manage the installation of application requirements.

When Conda is used to manage your app environment, Conda is also used to provide the underlying Python library for the running application, rather than an official Python or Briefcase-supplied Python support package.

Prerequisites¶

Briefcase requires the use of Conda 26.5 or higher.

Conda environment management can only be used for macOS and Windows apps. An error will be raised if you attempt to use Conda as an environment manager on any other platform.

To use Conda as the environment manager in your application, the conda binary must be available on your PATH. It can be installed using any of the installation methods described in the Conda documentation.

Configuration¶

To use Conda as the environment manager for your app, add env_manager = "conda" to your app configuration. This can be done as a global setting (in [tool.briefcase] section) or in a per-app setting (in the [tool.briefcase.app.myapp] section for myapp).

The Conda environments that are created by Briefcase are installed using the rattler resolver.

Specifying requirements¶

When conda is used as an environment manager, requirements are installed using conda install. The values provided to requires and test_requires must be in Conda-compatible format. The following would be examples of legal specifiers:

Bare package name:
```
requires = ["pillow"]
```
Fuzzy version match
```
requires = ["pillow=9.1"]
```
Channel-qualified install
```
requires = ["conda-forge::pillow"]
```

Conda cannot install packages stored as local source references. If your requirements reference a local path, Briefcase will use pip to install that requirement (and its dependencies) into your Conda environment. The following are examples of paths that would be installed with pip:

A local directory:
```
requires = [
    "../mysrc/myapp",
    "./local/otherapp",
    "/usr/local/fullapp",
]
```
When in development mode, a reference to a local directory will be installed editable. Any changes made to the code in the original location will be picked up automatically the next time you start your application in development mode. When generating a final application, editable mode will not be used.

Local wheel file:

requires = [
    "../mysrc/myapp-1.2.3.py3-none-any.whl",
    "./local/otherapp-1.2.3.py3-none-any.whl",
    "/usr/local/fullapp-1.2.3.py3-none-any.whl",
]