Using Software Environments in Julia

Banyan allows you to easily install and use Julia packages in your sessions. You can manage the required packages for your project by creating a Julia environment. Banyan allows you to specify a Julia environment to use in your session.

When starting a session from the Julia client library, you can either specify a GitHub repository containing the environment, which is useful for local development on a Julia package. If this is not specified, Banyan will automatically determine the packages in your currently activated environment and ensure these are available for all computation run in your session.

If your project environment contains unregistered packages that live in private GitHub repositories, please see this page for details on how to securely use them on the cluster.

Using a Local Environment

Banyan automatically detects the Julia environment that you have activated when you start a session and replicates the environment on the cluster. This means that the session has access to all packages that you have installed in your environment.

Dependencies that are imported in the Main module will be imported and available to be used in code that runs in the session.

Using a Remote Environment

You may want to instead develop on a Julia package and activate the environment specified by the Julia package. To do so, you can specify the path to the GitHub repository, a branch, and the path to the environment within the repository. You can do this by specifying the parameters url, branch, and directory when calling start_session. The repository will get cloned on the cluster and the specified environment will get activated.