Custom Environment

This guide will show you how to create a custom Conda Virtual Environment and use it to launch the notebook. You can use these custom-built environment to install Python/Conda libraries which are not part of the existing environment.

Steps to Create

Open a Terminal Notebook and run the following commands.

1. Initialize the environment:

   cd ~              # Make sure you are in the HOME directory.
   conda init bash
   source .bashrc
   

2. Create an environment file: For the example sake, we are assuming that the library we want to install is arrow, name of the environment is myenv and environment file name is env.yml. The content of the environment file would be as follows:

   name: myenv
   channels:
       - conda-forge
   dependencies:
       - python==3.7
       - pip:
           - arrow
           - ipykernel
   

3. Create and activate the environment:

   conda env create -f env.yml
   conda activate myenv
   

4. Create a kernel with the environment:

   python -m ipykernel install --user --name=myenv --display-name="MyEnv"
   # Reload the browser to refelect the installed kernel
   

Example Notebook

In the following example, you will use a newly installed kernel.

Open a Python Notebook, select kernel MyEnv and put the following in a code cell:

import arrow

utc = arrow.utcnow()
utc = utc.shift(hours=-1)
local = utc.to('US/Pacific')
local.humanize()

Expected output would be:

an hour ago