Common Settings

These keys apply to every build target and appear at the top level of the manifest.

Required fields

• name — ASCII string composed of letters, digits, -, _, or .. Used when naming installers, archives, and tags.
• version — ASCII string without whitespace. Appended to artifact names and container tags.
• author — Free-form maintainer identifier bundled into metadata.
• channels — Non-empty array of Conda channels evaluated in order of precedence.
• platforms — Non-empty array of Conda platforms (for example linux-64, osx-arm64). Each platform yields a distinct installer executable.

Dependencies

Declare package requirements with a table of Conda match specs:

[dependencies]
python = "3.11.*"
pandas = "^2.2"

Metadata

Populate optional descriptive fields for installers and summary output:

[metadata]
summary = "MyApp command suite"
description = "Command-line utilities for data preparation."
release_notes = "- Initial publication."
featured_packages = ["python", "pandas"]

Virtual packages

conda-dist seeds each platform with sensible defaults for synthetic virtual packages instead of probing the build host. Override values only when you need to pin a specific runtime characteristic.

[virtual_packages.default]
linux = "5.15"
libc = { family = "glibc", version = "2.31" }

[virtual_packages.linux-64]
cuda = "12.2"

Use the default table for cross-platform values and add per-platform tables to override individual targets. Supported keys are linux, osx, win, libc, and cuda.