Contributing Packages To conda-forge Using Grayskull

When contributing packages to conda-forge, Grayskull can make your life much easier. Grayskull generates recipes for Python packages hosted on PyPI. As the introduction for Grayskull reads; “The main goal of this project is to generate concise recipes for conda-forge.”

In this tutorial we learn how to contribute a Python package to the conda-forge channel using Grayskull to generate the recipe.

Let us get started.

  1. Install grayskull using conda through the conda-forge channel: conda install -c conda-forge grayskull
  2. Fork and clone the conda-forge staged-recipes repository from GitHub.
  3. Fetch a new branch from the master branch.
  4. Through CLI enter inside the ‘staged-recipes’ directory.
  5. Call grayskull and pass the pypi repository, followed by the name of the package you want to contribute to conda-forge. For example: grayskull pypi abc
    Grayskull will create a folder with the same name as the package (in this case: ‘abc’) in the ‘recipes’ folder of the ‘staged-recipes’ directory.
    This folder will contain the meta.yaml file and also the license file if the package includes a license in the PyPI distribution.
  6. Go through the generated meta.yaml file. For simpler packages, the generated recipes are nearly perfect, but for some packages you might need to make certain tweaks.
  7. Commit and push the changes.
    git add.
    git commit -m “add a commit message”
    git push
  8. Create a PR. Dropping a message in the conda-forge public Gitter channel and a link to your PR might be a good idea to get your PR reviewed and merged.

Once the PR gets merged, your package will be available on the conda-forge channel.
Tada! It’s that easy.