Local environments and CI

Workspace environments are project-local, standard conda prefixes. This keeps project environments separate from global conda environments while still allowing normal conda activation and execution workflows.

Project-local environments

All environments are installed under .conda/envs/ in your project directory:

my-project/
├── conda.toml
├── conda.lock
├── .conda/
│   └── envs/
│       ├── default/
│       ├── test/
│       └── docs/
└── src/

Environments are standard conda prefixes. Use conda workspace run -e <name> -- CMD to run a command in an environment, conda workspace shell -e <name> for an interactive shell, or conda activate .conda/envs/<name> directly.

Optimizing disk usage with hardlinks

conda hardlinks packages from its global cache into environment prefixes, which saves significant disk space. In CI and Docker the global cache is often on a different filesystem or volume from the project directory, causing conda to silently fall back to copying packages. That roughly doubles disk usage per environment.

Set the CONDA_PKGS_DIRS environment variable to a project-local path before installing so that the cache and environments share a filesystem:

export CONDA_PKGS_DIRS="$PWD/.conda/pkgs"
conda workspace install

GitHub Actions

- name: Install workspace
  run: |
    export CONDA_PKGS_DIRS="$PWD/.conda/pkgs"
    conda workspace install

GitLab CI

install:
  script:
    - export CONDA_PKGS_DIRS="$PWD/.conda/pkgs"
    - conda workspace install

On developer workstations the global cache is usually on the same filesystem and hardlinks work without any extra configuration.