Installing conda packages on studios

Hello
I’m trying to do some debugging/developing, so I’m using the rstudio studio. There are some packages where it looks like I need to install them via conda, and not R (since R install.packages fails).

What is the conda (or conda equivalent) command when running a Seqera studio. Is it __mambma_exe?

I know I can set up a conda file when building the studio, but I want to install another package when it is running. Is there a way to do so? Alternatives to what I want to do?

Thank you,

Uri David

Great question Uri

There are a couple of options:

  1. Use Wave to pre-bake the dependencies in your container (docs)
  2. Install using micromamba on the Studio CLI

Installing Using Wave

Each studio is a docker image running on the cloud batch executor of your choice. Seqera provides a series of containers out of the box, like the R IDE image that you’re using, but you are not limited to those images. You can use Wave to augment those base images with customer conda packages. If you click the “Install Conda Packages” checkbox when creating the studio, you can paste in a conda environment yaml. Wave will build you a container with those dependencies so that everything is installed and ready to go when you launch the container.

CleanShot 2025-08-29 at 10.14.53

Installing Using Micromamba

Our base images already come with micromamba installed, you can install from the CLI interactively. For example:

micromamba install -c conda-forge -c bioconda samtools