I want to use Julia on my poorly HD endowed Macbook Air but with all packages and whatnot it takes up several gigabytes. Can I install everything on an external hard drive and have a portable installation of Julia? I can host the Julia.app on an eHD but it still installs .julia and other hidden folders on my system drive.
The “.julia” folder is called a depot. You can control the set of depots with DEPOT_PATH. It should be enough to pushfirst!(DEPOT_PATH, "/path/to/drive/julia_depot") in your startup.jl file.
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Note, however, that some packages have a build step and depending on what the build step does, the resulting build artifacts may not be relocatable because they have absolute paths baked into them. If, however, you always mount the external HD at the same location on different systems then they should still work fine.
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