Document how to create a shared conda environment

Update by Erik 2021-10-25

A sensible pattern to do this is by doing either…

$ sudo -E conda install -c conda-forge nb_conda_kernels
$ sudo -E conda create -c conda-forge -n <conda-env-name> python ipykernel
$ sudo tljh-config reload hub

Or following #697, by doing…

$ sudo -E mamba install nb_conda_kernels
$ sudo -E mamba create -n <conda-env-name> python ipykernel <other packages>
$ sudo tljh-config reload hub

Original issue

I’d like to to deploy jupyterhub on a bare-metal server using TLJH (BTW, thanks for providing this well-documented tool, this looks like it will make things a lot easier for me!).

In our team we’re used to maintain separate conda environments for each of our projects, and use nb_conda_kernels to easily switch between kernels within the notebook or lab interface. This is much easier to maintain than one single, big conda environment.

As I understand, TLJH only provides one shared conda environment. How easy/hard would it be to add support in TLJH for multiple conda environments shared between all users + nb_conda_kernels?

[jetilton]

$ sudo -E conda install -c conda-forge nb_conda_kernels
$ sudo -E conda create -n myproject python numpy scipy ipykernel -c conda-forge
$ sudo tljh-config reload hub

@benbovy The above did not work for me. Did you do this in the tljh termina? I did and restarted my notebook I still only see Python 3 as my only option. Has there been any follow up on documentation?

Thanks

EDIT

Nevermind. I did the above, then nothing seemed to work, went to control panel and stopped/started my server and everything works as expected!

[benbovy]

So I tested it on a fresh tljh deployment and it worked well! I did no more than

$ sudo -E conda install -c conda-forge nb_conda_kernels
$ sudo -E conda create -n myproject python numpy scipy ipykernel -c conda-forge
$ sudo tljh-config reload hub

It would be great to have a custom hook to create new conda environments! That would be very useful for creating plugins that provide multiple environments!