Constructor is a tool which allows constructing an installer for a collection of conda packages. It solves needed packages using user-provided specifications, and bundles those packages. It can currently create 3 kinds of installers, which are best thought of as delivery vehicles for the bundled packages. There are shell installers, MacOS .pkg installers, and Windows .exe installers. Each of these will create an environment on the end user's system that contains the specs you provided, along with any necessary dependencies. These installers are similar to the Anaconda and Miniconda installers, and indeed constructor is used to create those installers.
constructor can be installed into the base environment using:
$ conda install constructor
Once installed, the constructor command will be available:
$ constructor -h
The constructor command takes an installer specification directory as its
argument. This directory needs to contain a file construct.yaml,
which specifies the name of the installer, the conda channels to
pull packages from, the conda packages included in the installer etc. .
The complete list of keys in this file can be
found in CONSTRUCT.md.
Also, the directory may contain some additional optional files (such as a
license file, and image files for the Windows installer).
An example is located
in examples/maxiconda.
To build or update README.md at the root of the repo you'll need jinja2 installed
conda install jinja2
and then run make doc. Or invoke the script directly with python scripts/make_docs.py.