Fast Software Package Management for Bio and Data Science

The conda-forge project is a community-maintained distribution of software packages for biological sciences, data sciences, physics, robotics and many more scientific disciplines. It comprises over 10,000 C, C++, Python and R packages. Over 250 million packages are downloaded from the conda-forge channel monthly. Bioconda and conda-forge are determined to enable reproducible science, and have never removed outdated packages.

Mamba is a package and virtual environment manager that is fully compatible with all existing and future conda packages, including the conda-forge and bioconda channels. It is an alternative implementation of the conda package manager in C++, which solves speed and efficiency issues of the original “conda” implementation in Python. Mamba is built upon well-established open-source libraries such as libsolv for fast dependency resolutions (in use by major Linux distributions like Fedora, RedHat, and OpenSuse), and libcurl for parallel downloads. Mamba is being developed at a faster pace than the original Python implementation as it has a smaller, modern codebase. Mamba’s solid dependency solver ensures that the package manager can keep up with the fast-paced growth of conda-forge and bioconda. Mamba also enables additional innovations: micromamba, a small, encapsulated executable that can be used as a fully-fledged package and virtual environment manager and allows users to bootstrap conda environments.