Installing packages and Julia outside of home folder? (minimal user space)

General Usage
1

Hello!

I am about to work on a HPC with very limited home user space (about 5GB). From experience, I know that my julia projects can quickly add lots of packages, etc into the user’s .julia folder. Is there a documented way to specify to install everything into a “project” folder (this is the way this HPC works apparently).

So for example, having a structure like this:

/path/to/project/.julia
/path/to/project/src
/path/to/project/test
/path/to/project/etc

The .julia folder (package and binary) could be decoupled from /path/to/project/, as long as space is not taken in the home folder.

I have looked at the different threads and I haven’t seen an easy way to do it. This seems like something happening often in the HPC world no?

2

The JULIA_DEPOT_PATH environment variable can be used to customize a location for what’s normally in .julia.

1 Like
3

In addition to @GunnarFarneback’s suggestion, a simple symlink could also do the job just fine.

2 Likes
4

Thanks! So, I could simply install julia with say juliaup, then define the JULIA_DEPOT_PATH=/path/to/project/.julia and the packages should install there when I add packages, create environments, etc?

For symlink, I am less used to use that. How should I implement that? I was under the impression that with symlink, the packages would still be installed in the home folder (?)

5

Yes. But if you have multiple projects you most likely want to share one depot between them.

The general symlink idea would be to put a pointer from ~/.julia to a different filesystem. Then the files would be addressed like they were in your home folder but in fact they reside somewhere else.

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6

Ah, I see, thanks!

It should be only a single project, it is a temporary computing solution. I’ll give a try next week. Thanks again for your answers @GunnarFarneback and @abraemer