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Welcome to the conda-auth wiki!

For now this will be a random collection of publicly available notes for the development of this plugin.

Goals of the project

• More secure way of storing credentials (both user credentials and tokens)
• Support additional authentication schemes (e.g. OAuth2, etc.)

Rationale

Currently when using conda, if you want to use a channel that requires the use HTTP Basic Authentication, you need to store your user credentials in your .condarc file:

channels:
  - https://username:password@example.com/channel

The example above has one primary problem: storing credentials in clear text. This is a practice that is frowned upon generally and one we should avoid if possible.

Environment variables provide a workaround for this, but this is often cumbersome to do for desktop installations.

The conda-auth project aims to solve this problem by storing credentials in an encrypted and password protected manner. This is accomplished by introducing a dependency on the keyring project. This Python library uses the underlying secret store mechanism for many types of desktop operating systems, including Windows, OSX and Linux.

Using this plugin will then ensure that users are storing their user credentials in a safer manner.

Release plans

• Initial release 0.0.1
• Second release: 0.0.2