New conda environments in ~/.conda/ by default

[danielhollas]

In the current image, when a user creates a new conda environment with conda create --name new-env, it will be created in /opt/conda/envs, but that's no good since it will not be persisted between container invocation.

In the QeApp, this is solved by specifying the full path to the environment like this:

conda create -p ~/.conda/envs/quantum-espresso

https://github.com/aiidalab/aiidalab-qe/blob/d6b6d046d42b186be60bbd34ca8d001a3fc4060a/aiidalab_qe/setup_codes.py#L44
But the disadvantage is that to activate this environment, one needs to provide the full path as well, which is clumsy.

In this PR I modify the conda config so that the new environments are created in ~/.conda/envs/ by default.
This change actually makes the behavior consistent with the old docker stack image, so it should make migration easier for AiiDAlab app developers.

Closes #352

[yakutovicha]

LGTM!

[unkcpz]

Just a reminder, we need to be careful to add more configurations to home folder. As mentioned in #347 (comment), when starting the image by singleuser.sh by spawner in production deployment, the mounted home volume will be wiped.

[yakutovicha]

Just a reminder, we need to be careful to add more configurations to home folder. As mentioned in #347 (comment), when starting the image by singleuser.sh by spawner in production deployment, the mounted home volume will be wiped.

I am not sure how #347 (comment) is related to this PR. For sure, the bug needs to be fixed.

Unrelated to that, keeping the conda environment in the home folder seems the right choice.

[unkcpz]

Unrelated to that, keeping the conda environment in the home folder seems the right choice.

My concern is even in this PR the ~/.conda is added to the home folder, I think is the production development by Jupyterhub, the files will not exist after the container started.
Instead, everything added to the HOME should add by a script in before-notebook.d.

P.S I'll give this change a test by using the new image in THEOS deployment.

[unkcpz]

Sorry, I was wrong about this, I didn't look carefully at the change. This PR didn't make any modifications to the home folder.

[danielhollas]

@unkcpz indeed.Here I only modified the global conda configuration, which is itself stored I believe in /opt/conda/.condarc