Conda custom channel on windows

Question

I've created a custom channel on a windows box following the steps detailed here.

Now I'd like to access it from a different machine but the channel parameter is a URI and I don't know what form it should take with Windows.

Here's the command I tried to execute:

conda search -c file://machine\C\channel --override-channels scipy

which failed with the following error message:

Fetching package metadata: Error: Invalid index file

Answer 1

I have been trying to do the same thing, and the answer by Paul made me a bit pessimistic.

It turns out that it is possible to use a UNC-path. After trying a few hundred combinations of slashes and backslashes, I found this combination to work:

conda search -c "file://\\DOMAIN\SERVER\SHARE\conda\channel" --override-channels

Similarly,

conda config --add channels "file://\\DOMAIN\SERVER\SHARE\conda\channel"

Adds the channel to your config file.

Answer 2

Let's say that your custom channel is located in the following directory: N:\conda\channel. Then we would expect to see the following in this directory (1) the win-64 directory (2) the index files inside, in this case the directory N:\conda\channel\win-64\, of repodata.json and repodata.json.bz2 (3) any packages that you have added to your channel. A search on this channel for the scipy package, ignoring all other channels, would look like this conda search -c file://N:\conda\channel --override-channels scipy

Did you add the scipy package into your custom channel? If you did, then did you run conda index on that directory?

I'm a little confused by your directory structure but, if your channel is machine\C\channel, then what happens when you do dir machine\C\channel?