getExternalDir: Get an external conda directory

In basilisk.utils: Basilisk Installation Utilities

Description

Define an external location for installing the conda instance and basilisk environments.

Usage

getExternalDir()

Details

The default path contains the version number so that re-installation of basilisk will install a new instance of Conda. (This assumes that basilisk and basilisk.utils have synchronized version bumps.) See installConda for more details on how old versions of Conda are managed in this external directory.

If the BASILISK_EXTERNAL_DIR environment variable is set to some location, this will be used instead as the installation directory. Setting this variable is occasionally necessary if the default path returned by user_cache_dir has spaces; or on Windows, if the 260 character limit is exceeded after combining the default path with deeply nested conda paths.

We assume that the user has read-write access to the external directory. Write access is necessary to generate new environments and to handle locking in lockExternalDir.

Value

String containing a path to an appropriate external folder. The last component of the path will always be the basilisk version number.

Author(s)

Aaron Lun

See Also

getCondaDir, to obtain the Conda installation directory.

Examples

# We can't actually run getExternalDir() here, as it 
# either relies on basilisk already being installed.
print("dummy test to pass BiocCheck")

basilisk.utils documentation built on Jan. 29, 2021, 2 a.m.