how to import conda packages into google colab?

Question

I was able to install packages in google colab with pip, using:

!pip install....

but i am not able to install any package from conda-forge. I tried:

!conda install -c conda-forge cartopy

Answer 1

In general, this is a way to install a package in conda from Colab:

!wget https://repo.continuum.io/miniconda/Miniconda3-4.5.4-Linux-x86_64.sh
!bash Miniconda3-4.5.4-Linux-x86_64.sh -bfp /usr/local
# Append path to be able to run packages installed with conda
import sys
sys.path.append('/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages')
# Install packages from Anaconda
!conda install -y [package]

This works for packages like -c pslmodels taxcalc (notebook).

However, cartopy is a complicated package that's creating problems here, I think because the above requires an older version of conda*, which is no longer compatible with cartopy. Here's a Colab notebook that uses this version and fails because cartopy requires the shapefile package, and this is one that uses the latest version of conda and isn't recognized upon import.

* For example, here are versions of the taxcalc notebook that install the latest installer and run conda update conda before installing taxcalc; import taxcalc isn't recognized in either case. See this GitHub issue.

Answer 2

One way to get it is to just Unzip the conda package to a directory directly.

1. Get you required conda package from anaconda.org, download it.

2. Decompress them and copy them into the library path

Here's an example to install faiss from anaconda using this way. https://gist.github.com/korakot/d0a49d7280bd3fb856ae6517bfe8da7a