How can we recover packages that were removed from datalab?

Question

Hello, 

We've recently ran into a issue where several of our packages we've downloaded and installed to datalab including "astroalign" and "ois" are not found. We've tried to re-install these packages using "!pip install astroalign" and  for example, but got this output:

/bin/bash: pip: command not found

We also ran "%pip install astroalign" and got:

/bin/bash: /data0/sw/anaconda3/bin/conda: No such file or directory

Note: you may need to restart the kernel to use updated packages.

How can we recover the packages we've installed that were recently removed from datalab? Is there another command to install modules that we can use? 

Best Regards,

Avi 

Answer 1

The notebook software stack was recently updated and this included a bum from Python 3.7 to 3.8.  So, previous packages done with a "!pip install" would appear in your $HOME/.local/lib/python3.7 directory but would need to be re-installed to be found in the $HOME/.local/lib/python3.8 directory that is now used.  Unfortunately, this update also broke the "!pip" behavior and for the moment you need to use

    %%bash
    pip install <package>

from a code cell in a notebook.  A fix to the '!pip' behavior will be included in the next update of the code stack so this is hopefully a temporary workaround.  Please let us know if you continue to have problems.