Create PyBaMM conda package

Summary Make PyBaMM available as a conda package, for instance through conda-forge.

$ conda install -c conda-forge pybamm

I opened a PR to add PyBaMM to conda-forge, see conda-forge/staged-recipes#11046. It’s been reviewed quickly but now I’ve been waiting for the merge for a week. This should happen soon I hope 😃

Motivation The Anaconda and miniconda python distributions are widely used. Although the conda package manager now integrates fairly well with pip, installing PyBaMM through pip within an Anaconda environment may lead to dependencies issues and is discouraged. Furthermore, providing a conda package for PyBaMM would give Anaconda (or miniconda) users the possibility to install PyBaMM as they install any other conda package.

Additional context conda packages are built using conda-build, from a meta.yaml (also known as a recipe) file that describes the package: its source code, how to install and test it, and some metadata. These packages can technically be hosted and distributed from anywhere, but conda-forge serves as a central, community-driven repository for conda packages (a bit like PyPI for regular Python packages). To contribute a package to conda-forge, one must fork the conda-forge/staged-recipes repo, add the new recipe(s), and open a PR for the original repo. Upon the merge, the package is built and uploaded to anaconda.org/conda-forge.

Dependencies When building a conda package, all of its dependencies must also be available as conda packages. Between the anaconda and conda-forge channel, most of pybamm’s dependencies are statisfied, except anytree, scikit-fem and casadi. I built conda packages for anytree and scikit-fem, so these should also be available on conda-forge and therefore as PyBaMM dependencies once my PR is merged. The case of casadi remains only problematic for windows support, as casadi is already available on conda-forge but only for linux and macos. I considered building a conda package for casadi for Windows but quickly realised that it is not at all straightforward (this would require compiling a lot of C and the dependency chain looks fairly long!). Actually compiling casadi on windows is strongly discouraged. It’s a shame because Windows support was actually one of my main motivation for providing pybamm as a conda package.

[schatt89]

I installed sundails and now everything works fine, thank you. Sorry for the slow response!

[tinosulzer]

Oh I thought I read it could, never mind. Not a big deal about the idaklu solver, will close this one. Also not available through conda on windows, right?