conda-index creates conda channels from a collection of conda packages.

The conda_index command operates on a channel directory. A channel directory can't be named after a supported platform and must contain a noarch subdirectory. It will usually contain other subdirectories named for conda's supported platforms linux-64, win-64, osx-64, etc. Place packages into their corresponding subdirectories. Then run conda-index to extract metadata from these packages to generate index.html, repodata.json etc. with summaries of the packages' metadata. conda uses the metadata to solve dependencies before doing an install.

By default the metadata is output to the same directory tree as the channel directory but it can be output to a separate tree with the --output <output> parameter. The metadata cache is placed with the packages, in .cache folders under each platform subdirectory.

After conda-index has finished, its output can be used as a channel conda install -c file:///path/to/output ... or would typically be placed on a web server.

python -m conda_index <path to channel directory>

An equivalent conda subcommand, conda index, is also available.

python -m conda_index --verbose --threads=1 <path to channel directory>

conda create -n conda-index "python >=3.9" conda conda-build "pip >=22"

git clone https://github.com/conda/conda-index.git
pip install -e conda-index[test]

cd conda-index
pytest

This version of conda-index continues indexing packages from other subdirs while the main thread is writing repodata.json.

All current_repodata.json are generated in parallel. This may use a lot of ram if repodata.json has tens of thousands of entries.