Infrastructure

Repositories

Staging area for recipes

conda-forge/staged-recipes is the entry point for new packages to join the conda-forge package collection. You can find the detailed guide for submitting new package recipes in The staging process.

Smithy

Smithy contains maintenance code for conda-forge, which is used by the conda-smithy command line tool and the Admin web services. Smithy lives in the repository conda-forge/conda-smithy.

conda-forge/conda-smithy is the right repository to report bugs for

• The rerendering process

• The recipe linter

• CI support utils

conda-smithy also contains the command line tool that you should use if you rerender manually from the command line (see Rerendering feedstocks).

Smithy can be used beyond conda-forge’s purposes. For example, it can be used to set up self-hosted Azure agents <azure-config> for non-conda-forge infrastructures. (You could also consider using Azure virtual machine scale set agents, which could be less expensive to run than permanently active agents.)

Web services

The Heroku app providing the conda-forge web services lives in conda-forge/conda-forge-webservices. Please note that the code logic provided by the app is in the Smithy repository.

Bugs or suggestions regarding the service functionality should therefore be opened in conda-forge/conda-smithy’s bug tracker.

conda-forge pinning

Package-wide dependency pins are defined in conda_build_config.yaml in the conda-forge/conda-forge-pinning-feedstock.

For more information on conda-forge wide package pins, please refer to Globally pinned packages.

Please open a PR and/or an issue there, if you think a pin needs to be advanced. For more information on updating globally pinned packages, please refer to Updating package pins.

Documentation

The documentation lives in conda-forge/conda-forge.github.io, and is automatically deployed to our online version.

The documentation is built with Sphinx and the sources files are located in the src directory of the repository.

If you found any typo error, unclear explanations or new topics that can be covered, you can suggest changes to the documentation. For more details, please refer to Improve the documentation.

Admin web services

conda-forge is running a webservice on Heroku called conda-forge-webservices.

The following services are run by default on a feedstock:

• It will lint the recipes in the PRs and report back whether the recipe is in excellent condition or not.

• When maintainers are added to a recipe, each of the maintainers will be added to the team and given push access to the feedstock.

The webservice also listens to issues and PR comments, so that you can ask for the following services to be done:

@conda-forge-admin, please rerender

Entering the above phrase in a PR of a feedstock will rerender the feedstock and push the changes to your PR. Make sure to tick the Allow edits from maintainers button located at the bottom of the right side bar of the PR. If you enter this phrase in the comment for an issue, the bot will create a new pull request, with the requested re-rendering being completed.

@conda-forge-admin, please add noarch: python

Entering the above phrase in a PR or an issue of a feedstock will add noarch: python to the build and rerender the feedstock for you.

@conda-forge-admin, please update for conda-build 3

This command will attempt to update a recipe to the new conda-build 3 format. It can be sent either in an issue or a PR.

Note that this update command is kind of a hack, and things might go wrong. Make sure to look over the changes, and ask for help if you’re not sure about something.

@conda-forge-admin, please lint

Entering the above phrase in a PR of a feedstock will lint the PR again.

@conda-forge-admin, please update team

Entering the above phrase in an issue will update the team for the feedstock. This is usually done automatically.

@conda-forge-admin, please restart ci

Entering this command in the PR of a feedstock or staged-recipes will close and then open the PR, causing all of the CI builds to restart.

@conda-forge-admin, please ping team

Entering this command in the PR of a feedstock or staged-recipes will have the admin bot @-mention the team associated with the repo. This command can be useful for people who are not yet members of conda-forge and so cannot @-mention the staged-recipes team for PR reviews.

@conda-forge-admin, please ping conda-forge/<team>

Entering this command in the PR of a feedstock or staged-recipes will have the admin bot @-mention the respective team. This command can be useful for people who are not yet members of conda-forge and so cannot @-mention someone due to the general GitHub limitations.

@conda-forge-admin, please rerun bot

Entering this command in a PR comment will add the bot-rerun label to that PR. This label will cause the auto-tick bot that issues migration and version updates to close the current PR and reissue it. Adding this label to non-bot issued PRs will have no effect.

@conda-forge-admin, please add bot automerge

Entering this command in the title or comment of an issue will instruct the admin bot to open a PR enabling the automatic merging of passing PRs from the auto-tick bot. This functionality is currently experimental. You can find more details here. Please open issue on regro/cf-scripts for any feedback, bugs, and/or questions!

@conda-forge-admin, please remove bot automerge

Entering this command in the title or comment of an issue will instruct the admin bot to open a PR to disable automerge, undoing the please add bot automerge command.

@conda-forge-admin, please add user @username

Entering the above phrase in the title of an issue on a feedstock will make a PR that adds the given user to the feedstock. A maintainer or member of core can then merge this PR to add the user. Please do not modify this PR or adjust the commit message. This PR is designed to skip building the package.

@conda-forge-admin, please update version

Entering the above phrase in the title of an issue on a feedstock will request the bot to check if there are any new versions available. If there are, it will open a PR with with the needed changes. Note that the bot might start by opening a PR with only partial changes. The rest of the contents will be added in a subsequent commit after a few minutes.

CI build services

Here we describe common issues with the CI Services that conda-forge builds.

Azure Pipelines

Azure is used to build packages for OSX, Linux (x86_64, native), Linux (ARMv8, emulated) and Linux (IBM Power8+, emulated). The build queue on Azure is substantially larger than on all the other providers. Azure builds have a maximum duration of 6 hours.

To see all builds on Azure, visit https://dev.azure.com/conda-forge/feedstock-builds/_build.

Restarting builds

Presently Azure does not sync GitHub users. In order to restart a build you can restart it from the GitHub checks interface. If that doesn’t work, a close/open will kick off a new build. You can also use the web services command @conda-forge-admin, please restart ci.

Using Azure for everything

Azure is the default provider for Linux and OSX. To use Azure for everything, add the following to conda-forge.yml in the root of the feedstock.

provider:
  win: azure

Note

Presently Azure has some issues building libraries using cmake on Windows. Azure does not have a VS2008 installation, so building certain very old packages that require VC9 will fail.

TravisCI (IBM Power 8+, ARM)

TravisCI is used to build packages for IBM Power 8+ and ARM. After merging a staged-recipes pull request, it might be necessary to force sync your repositories in TravisCI to see the reload and cancel buttons. To do this please visit https://app.travis-ci.com/account/repositories and click the “Sync accounts” button.

Enabling Travis

TravisCI should only be needed to build recipes on OSX, if there is a strange failure on Azure.

Enable a build by adding the following to conda-forge.yml in the root of the feedstock.

provider:
  osx: travis

For IBM Power 8+ and/or ARM builds, add the name of your feedstock to the list here via a pull request.

GitHub Actions

We use GitHub actions to rerender feedstocks and also run our pull request automerge service. We do not currently support builds on GitHub Actions.

Automerge

The automerge service uses the GitHub action in this repo. This action runs out of a Docker container on the prod tag. See the repo README.md for more details. PRs are automatically merged if they satisfy either of the two following sets of conditions:

1. are from the regro-cf-autotick-bot, have [bot-automerge] in the title, all statuses are passing, and the feedstock allows automerge

2. have the automerge label and all statuses are passing.

For PRs from the regro-cf-autotick-bot, it can be useful to remove the [bot-automerge] slug from the PR title if you are making edits to the PR.

Rerendering

The rerendering service is triggered by the Heroku app. It uses the GitHub action in this repo. This action runs out of a Docker container on the prod tag. See the repo README.md for more details.

Skipping CI builds

To skip a CI build for a given commit, put [ci skip] ***NO_CI*** in the commit message.

Related links

• Abort builds with [skip ci]/etc (conda-forge.github.io/#629)

• Skip CI requests (staged-recipes/#1148)

Third-party Use of Our CI Services

Due to its stature in the open-source community, conda-forge has enhanced access to certain CI services. This access is a community resource entrusted to conda-forge for use in building packages. We thus cannot support third-party or “off-label” CI jobs in our feedstocks on any of our CI services. If we find such use, we will politely ask the maintainers to rectify the situation. We may take more serious actions, including archiving feedstocks or removing maintainers from the organization, if the situation cannot be rectified.

Compilers and Runtimes

conda-forge builds and maintains its own set of compilers for various languages and/or systems (e.g., C, FORTRAN, C++, CUDA, etc.). These are used in all of our CI builds to build both core dependencies (e.g., Python) and maintainer-contributed packages. While we do not have any formal policies or promises of support for these compilers, we have historically maintained them according to the following (non-binding) principles.

• The authoritative source of the current compilers and versions for various languages and platforms is the conda_build_config.yaml in the conda-forge/conda-forge-pinning-feedstock as described in Globally pinned packages.

• We provide no support of any kind in terms of the long-term stability of these pinnings.

• We upgrade them in an ad-hoc manner on a periodic basis as we have the time and energy to do so. Note that because of the way we enforce runtime constraints, these compiler upgrades will not break existing packages. However, if you are using the compilers outside of conda, then you may find issues.

• We generally provide notice in the form of an announcement when a compiler is going to be upgraded. Note that these changes take a bit of time to complete, so you will generally have time to prepare should you need to.

• Some of the criteria we think about when considering a compiler migration include 1) the degree of disruption to the ecosystem, 2) the amount of work for the core team, and 3) the amount of time it will cost our (volunteer) feedstock maintainers.

We do use some unofficial names for our compiler stack internally. Note however that the existence of these names does not imply any level of support or stability for the compilers that form the given stack.

• Our current compiler stack is referred to internally as comp7.

• The previous compiler stack based in part on the various toolchain_* packages was sometimes referred to as comp4. On linux the toolchain_* compilers were GCC 4.8.2 as packaged in the devtoolset-2 software collection. On osx, we use clang from Apple’s Xcode in the toolchain_* packages.

CentOS sysroot for linux-* Platforms

We currently repackage the sysroot from the appropriate version of CentOS for use with our compilers. These sysroot files are available in the sysroot_linux-* packages. These packages have version numbers that match the version of glibc they package. These versions are 2.12 for CentOS 6 and 2.17 for CentOS 7.

For gcc/gxx/gfortran versions prior to 8.4.0 on ppc64le and 7.5.0 on aarch64/x86_64, we had been building our own versions of glibc. This practice is now deprecated in favor of the CentOS-based sysroots. Additionally, as of the same compiler versions above, we have removed the cos* part of the sysroot path. The new sysroot path has in it simply conda as opposed to conda_cos6 or conda_cos7.

Output Validation and Feedstock Tokens

As of writing, anaconda.org does not support generating API tokens that are scoped to allow uploads for some packages but not others. In order to secure feedstock uploads, so that, e.g., the maintainers of the numpy feedstock cannot push a python package, we use a package staging process and issue secret tokens, unique to each feedback. This process works as follows.

1. When a CI job on a feedstock is building packages to be uploaded to anaconda.org, it first uploads them to a staging channel, cf-staging.

2. Then the feedback CI job makes an API call to our admin webservices server with its secret token and some information about the package it is trying to upload.

3. The webservices server validates the secret token, the integrity of the package, and that the package is allowed for the given feedstock.

4. If all of the validation passes, the package is then copied to the conda-forge channel.

We attempt to report errors in this process to users via comments on commits/issues in the feedstocks. Note however that sometimes these fail. If you think you are having trouble with uploads, make sure conda_forge_output_validation: true is set in your conda-forge.yml and rerender your feedstock with the latest version of conda-smithy. Finally, new packages that are added to feedstocks are registered automatically and once uploaded successfully, no other feedstock will be able to upload packages with the same name.

Sometimes, however, it might make better sense to generate a package from a different feedstock, say, due to package renaming or re-structuring. In this case, you may need to add the new feedstock to the feedstock-outputs map. If this is not done, then the output validation process will block the package from being uploaded from the new feedstock, by design. Once this is done correctly and the package is uploaded, you can then request the conda-forge core devs to archive the old feedstock.