Labels on Anaconda.org help you organize packages and control their visibility. By applying labels to packages, you can facilitate the development cycle—separating development, testing, and production code—without impacting users who only want stable releases. Using Anaconda Client, package developers can create labels like dev for development, test for testing, or rc for release candidates.

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Understanding labels

By default, conda only finds packages labeled main. If you don’t specify a label when uploading, your package automatically gets the main label. However, you can use other labels such as dev, test, or any-custom-label to effectively “hide” a package or package version from conda’s default search and install behavior. Users can still access the labeled package on Anaconda.org but must explicitly specify the label to find and install the package with conda.

Anaconda.org web URLs use /labels (plural) while conda commands use /label (singular).

The following examples use a Namespace of travis:

Web InterfaceConda CommandWhat it contains
anaconda.org/travisconda install --channel travis <PACKAGE>Default packages (main label only)
anaconda.org/travis/labels/mainconda install --channel travis/label/main <PACKAGE>Explicitly accessing main label
anaconda.org/travis/labels/devconda install --channel travis/label/dev <PACKAGE>Development packages
anaconda.org/travis/labels/testconda install --channel travis/label/test <PACKAGE>Testing packages

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Using labels to control package visibility

The following steps explain how to apply a test label, which allows you to upload files without affecting your production-quality packages, then how to apply the main label to make it visible to conda.

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Building and uploading the package

Use Anaconda Prompt (Terminal on macOS/Linux) to perform the following steps:

  1. Start with a conda package. In this example, we use a small public conda test package:

    git clone https://github.com/Anaconda-Platform/anaconda-client/
cd anaconda-client/example-packages/conda/

  2. Open the meta.yaml file by running the following command:

    nano meta.yaml

  3. Change the version number to 2.0. To save and close the meta.yaml file, press Ctrl+X, followed by Y.

  4. To build the package, turn off automatic Client uploading and then run the conda build command:

    conda config --set anaconda_upload no
conda build .

    You can check where the resulting file was placed by adding the --output option:

    conda build . --output

  5. Upload your test package to Anaconda.org using the Anaconda Client upload command.

    Add the --label option followed by your label (in this case, test), which tells Anaconda.org to make the upload visible only to users who specify that label:

    # Replace </PATH/TO/PACKAGE_NAME> with the correct file path and package name
anaconda upload </PATH/TO/PACKAGE_NAME>.tar.bz2 --label test

Now you can see that even when you search conda main, you do not see the 2.0 version of the test package. This is because you need to tell conda to look for your new test label.

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Testing the discoverability of the package

  1. Add the --override argument, which tells conda not to use any channels in your ~/.condarc file. Without specifying the label and package name, the 2.0 version is not discoverable:

    # Replace <USERNAME> with your username
conda search --override --channel <USERNAME> conda-package

    Once the label and package are specified, the 2.0 can be found:

    # Replace <USERNAME> with your username
conda search --override --channel <USERNAME>/label/test conda-package

  2. You can give the label <USERNAME>/label/test to your testers, where <USERNAME> is your username.

  3. Once they finish testing, you may then want to copy the test packages back to your main label:

    anaconda label --copy test main

    You can also manage your package labels from your dashboard at https://anaconda.org/USERNAME/conda-package, where <USERNAME> is your username.

    Your version 2.0 is now in main:

    # Replace <USERNAME> with your username
conda search --override --channel <USERNAME> conda-package

If you use anaconda-client 1.7 or higher, you can use anaconda move to move packages from one label to another:

# Replace <OLD> with the old label
# Replace <NEW> with the new label
# Replace <SPEC> with the package to move. SPEC can be either "user/package/version/file" or "user/package/version", in which case it moves all files in that version.
anaconda move --from-label <OLD> --to-label <NEW> <SPEC>