I have installed miniconda3 on a system using the bash installation script, then performed a conda install of some packages into this installation.
This installation is available to other users in a read-only fashion. They can source a setup script that adds the conda installation to their LD_LIBRARY_PATH, PATH, and PYTHONPATH.
I would like the user to be able to add their own custom modules on top of this environment.
Ideally the user would run some form of conda create environment that results in the user being able to install packages in their local environment, but takes the previously installed packages from my area.
Is there a good way to do this?
The important point for this is that my conda installation has some architecture specific libraries which are needed to get proper performance on the computer system we have. If a user does a standard conda create ... everything is installed from scratch and the user does not get the proper libraries.
It sounds like you want to clone the base Conda environment. You just need to use the --clone argument with the create command. See the link to documentation below:
https://conda.io/docs/user-guide/tasks/manage-environments.html#cloning-an-environment