It solves needed packages using user-provided specifications, and bundles those packages. It can currently create 4 kinds of installers, which are best thought of as delivery vehicles for the bundled packages. There are shell .sh installers, macOS .pkg installers, and Windows .exe and .msi installers.

Each of these will create an environment on the end user's system that contains the specs you provided, along with any necessary dependencies. These installers are similar to the Anaconda and Miniconda installers, and indeed constructor is used to create those installers.

Installation

constructor can be installed into any environment using:

$ conda install constructor

Once installed, the constructor command will be available:

$ constructor -h

Usage

The constructor command takes an installer specification directory as its argument. This directory needs to contain a file construct.yaml, which specifies the name of the installer, the conda channels to pull packages from, the conda packages included in the installer, etc. The complete list of keys in this file can be found in CONSTRUCT.md. Also, the directory may contain some additional optional files (such as a license file, and image files for the Windows installer). Examples for various installations are located in the examples directory.

More details can be found in the documentation.

Development

To build or update CONSTRUCT.md at the root of the repo you'll need to install the jinja2 package (conda install jinja2) and then run make doc, or invoke the the script directly with python scripts/make_docs.py.