2025-12-05 –, Main Stream Language: English
Managing Conda environments is essential for modern Python development, but it can be challenging. This is especially true for newcomers juggling long commands, complex dependencies, and the fear of breaking their installation. Gator offers a friendlier, visual way to create, clone, inspect, and manage environments, available both inside JupyterLab and as a standalone app launched with gator.
This talk introduces Gator, explains how it fits into Anaconda Toolbox, and gives an overview of its architecture: a shared React UI, a lightweight Jupyter Server backend, and REST endpoints that delegate to Conda or Mamba. I’ll also cover the recent work to revive and modernize Gator for JupyterLab 4, including UI updates and improved workflows.
Finally, we’ll look at what’s next: performance improvements, richer environment metadata, and deeper integration with other Toolbox features like Quick-Start Environments and the Anaconda Assistant. Whether you're new to Conda or a power user, Gator makes environment management smoother and more approachable.
A friendly introduction to Gator, an open-source UI for managing Conda/Mamba environments. Learn how it works, how it was modernized for JupyterLab 4, how it integrates into Anaconda Toolbox, and what’s next for simplifying Python environment management.
I am a software engineer at Anaconda, working on the OSS Jupyter team contributing to the Jupyter ecosystem. I am currently working on extension development and testing for Gator (which provides environment and package management interface) and jupyter-fsspec (providing an interface for interacting with fsspec filesystems).