Conda updated?

Using a tip from Travis Hathaway, here is a shell one-liner to check if a Conda environment is up to date:

conda update --all --dry-run --json | jq -e '.success and (.actions | length) == 0'

It exits (-e) with 0 if the environment is already updated and 1 if updates are available.

I use this in CI so that I get an email if my environment.yml file is holding any packages back.

Because this command actually executes the dependency solver, it won’t report the environment as out of date unless a package both has an available update and can be updated while satisfying all the other dependencies’ version constraints.