Conda to poetry environment

Question

I have a conda environment that I would like to convert to a poetry environment.

What I have tried is to translate the environment.yaml of the conda environment into a pyproject.toml file that poetry can read. Here you have the steps:

1. Generate the yaml file

   conda env export --from-history > environment.yaml

   The --from-history flag includes only the packages that I explicitly asked for. Here it is how the file looks like after installing numpy.

   # environment.yaml
   
   name: C:\Users\EDOCIC\Screepts\My_projects\Tests\conda2poetry\condaenv
   channels:
     - defaults
   dependencies:
     - numpy
   

2. Manually create the pyproject.toml file out of environment.yaml. I added the numpy version, which I got from conda env export. Here it is the result:

   # pyproject.toml
   
   [tool.poetry]
   name = "conda2poetry"
   version = "0.1.0"
   description = ""
   authors = [""]
   
   [tool.poetry.dependencies]
   python = "~3.7"
   numpy = "^1.21.5"
   
   [tool.poetry.dev-dependencies]
   
   [build-system]
   requires = ["poetry-core>=1.0.0"]
   build-backend = "poetry.core.masonry.api"
   

3. Create the environment with poetry init, which will automatically read the toml file.

The process seems to work but it's quite manual and prone to mistakes. Is there a better way?

Answer 1

No, there is not a better way. Conda is a generic package manager and does not discern Python versus non-Python packages, therefore this has to be done with manual curation.

Tips

In addition to pulling down the --from-history YAML, it may also help to dump out a pip list --format=freeze. This could help with resolving any tricky packages that use different names in Conda versus PyPI.

If the environment uses any PyPI packages directly, this won't be seen from a conda env export --from-history. However, these will appear when using conda list (entries with channel pypi) or plain conda env export, which would have a dependencies.pip: section if there are any.