Managing Environments

The @isolated decorator supports two types of target environments: virtualenv and conda. To specify the type of environment to create, pass the type argument to the decorator. For example:

@isolated(kind="virtualenv")
def my_function():
  ...

@isolated(kind="conda")
def my_other_function():
  ...

The default kind is virtualenv, so @isolated() is the same as @isolated(kind="virtualenv")

virtualenv environments

When using a virtualenv environment, you can specify additional dependencies using the requirements argument, which takes a list of package names. For example:

@isolated(kind="virtualenv", requirements=["pyjokes"])
def my_function():
  ...

You can also specify an exact version using the == operator.

@isolated(kind="virtualenv", requirements=["pyjokes==0.0.6"])
def my_function():
  ...

conda environments

conda environmet allow users to define both system and Python packages. When using a conda environment, you dependencies can be specified by using the packages argument, which takes a list of package names. For example:

@isolated(kind="conda", packages=["pytorch"])
def my_other_function():
  ...

The conda environment has the conda-forge and pytorch channels enabled by default.

If you need more control over packages and channels, you can use either env_yml or env_dict argument instead of packages.

env_yml accepts a path to a YAML file with a conda environment definition. For example:

@isolated(kind="conda", env_yml="my_env.yml")
def my_other_function():
  ...

where my_env.yml could be something like:

name: my_env
channels:
  - pytorch
  - defaults
dependencies:
  - pytorch

Similarly, env_dict is a dictionary representation of a conda environment YAML:

my_env = {
  "name": "my_env",
  "channels": ["pytorch", "defaults"],
  "dependencies": ["pytorch"]
}

@isolated(kind="conda", env_dict=my_env)
def my_other_function():
  ...

In the example above my_env has the same structure as an environment YAML file. You can think of it as a parsed version of a conda environment YAML.