condaforge

Conda-forge is a community-driven collection of recipes for the conda package manager, along with the infrastructure to build and distribute conda packages through a central channel. It is not controlled by a single company; volunteers maintain software packaging recipes and contribute to the project.

It hosts thousands of packages across Linux, macOS, and Windows. Each package is built from a feedstock—GitHub repositories containing a meta.yaml and related files. Builds are performed automatically across platforms, and conda-forge provides pre-built binaries for many architectures. The conda-forge channel is used by installing via conda, typically with the command to add the channel before installation.

The project relies on continuous integration pipelines and a community-maintained set of build recipes. Governance includes a Steering Council and various contributor groups; maintainers review pull requests and manage recipe changes, supported by community guidelines and a code of conduct.

To use conda-forge, users typically add the channel to their conda configuration, then install packages from that channel. For example, conda config --add channels conda-forge followed by conda install -c conda-forge package. Conda-forge complements the default Anaconda channel, offering a broader set of packages and often more rapid updates.

Originating around 2016 as a community response to gaps in official channels, conda-forge has grown into a widely used open-source packaging project. The recipes themselves are open source, maintained by the community, and the licenses of individual packages vary.