Best Practices

Dependency Management & Reproducibility

1. Always keep your abstract (unpinned) dependencies updated in environment.yaml and eventually in setup.cfg if you want to ship and install your package via pip later on.

2. Create concrete dependencies as environment.lock.yaml for the exact reproduction of your environment with:

   conda env export -n justcause -f environment.lock.yaml
   

   For multi-OS development, consider using --no-builds during the export.

3. Update your current environment with respect to a new environment.lock.yaml using:

   conda env update -f environment.lock.yaml --prune
   

Organization, Logging and Reproduction of Experiments

Sacred is a wonderful tool to do reproducible experimentation. From their documentation:

Sacred is a tool to configure, organize, log and reproduce computational experiments. It is designed to introduce only minimal overhead, while encouraging modularity and configurability of experiments.

We thus recommend to use it together with JustCause and will add some more details here soon.