[Tutor] Moving a conda environment to an off-line computer

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, Nov 30, 2018 at 01:47:11PM +0000, Henrique Castro wrote:

> Dear colleagues,

> Soon I'll start to use one of the powerful computers on my university 
> as a tool in my Ph.D. The computer does not have an internet 
> connection and I need to find a way to install a conda environment on 
> it.
[...]

Generally speaking, it is *really hard* to copy an installed suite of 
applications from one machine to another. It's usually best to get an 
off-line (no internet access) installer, copy it to the machine, then 
run the installer.

This isn't true in all cases, but many application installers make 
changes to (for example) hidden files, registry settings, environment 
variables etc and if you miss copying or duplicating even one, the 
application will not work correctly.

For an extremely specialised question like this, you should talk to 
Conda specialists, or Conda themselves. We know the Python language, 
we're not experts on the internal details of what it takes for Conda's 
suite of tools to work.

Possibly Conda provides a CD or DVD off-line installer?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Conda+off-line+installer

Another possibility is to build a desktop machine with Conda 
on-line, install everything you need, then copy that to a virtual 
machine and copy the VM to the university computer.

Talk to the university's system administrator about the possibility of 
running a VM on the computer.

Another possibility is that your installation of Conda is fine, but 
whatever function you tried using assumes that there is some sort of 
network connection available, and if it is not available, the function 
simply fails. If that's the case, you might be stuck: unless Conda fix 
the bug in the function, it won't work without a network connection.

Or perhaps you can talk to the sys admin about turning on the network 
software on the computer, even if it isn't connected to anything. That 
might be enough to allow the function to work. (Perhaps it tries to 
connect to localhost, and if that fails, the whole thing dies.)


-- 
Steve