environment sharing

[Distortedlogic]

I meant to post this issue after the sprint to provide example requirement.txt and environment.yml files but slipped my mind, until I received the update on my issue earlier in the unit.

Others and I consistently ran into issues installing with these files out of the box as provided throughout the entire unit 4.

For conda env, use of the --from-history flag will only list user installed conda packages instead of every single package in the env. conda env export --from-history > environment.yml

For .py files, the package pigar will generate a requirements.txt based off of import statements instead of every single package. It also references the files and line the import statement was made in as a comment. pip install pigar then just type and run pigar in terminal.

I have not yet found a good method for dealing with .ipynb as compared to above. Other than converting ipynb to py then use pigar and remove the py files.

There are minor ceavats like psychopg2 typically isnt directly imported due to use of flask-sqlalchemy, thus pigar wont catch it, for example. But it solves the more daunting issue of the dependency conflict nightmare.

These combined should generate more OS agnostic dependency files with less conflicts and errors for students, assuming they even use these files to create the env.