I read recently that conda is in fact a general purpose package manager, not specific to python.
conda installs packages which may contain software written in any language
Source: Anaconda blog
However all meta.yaml examples I could find always are for python packages.
I want to know how one should go about creating a conda package for any code whose purpose is to be run from a shell.
This would probably best be split into two categories; one for interpreted scripts, and one for compiled programs.
Interpreted scripts
For interpreted scripts, we need an interpreter, which we can assume is already packaged and available on conda. The interpreter could be python, bash, PHP, etc. The possibilities are endless.
For example, suppose I had some bash files foo and bar whose contents were something like this:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
echo "This is bash file foo"
echo "I want to make this into a package called foo"
echo "To use users should run:"
echo "$ conda install foo"
echo "$ foo arg1 arg2 etc"
"$(realpath "$(dirname "$0")")"/bar
echo "This is bash file bar"
echo "It's an helper file only called by foo"
This script would depend on its interpreter (bash) and possibly some other packages
Of course the same would apply to a python script, but the point I'm trying to get across is that the actual language that the script is written in doesn't matter to me, and also I don't need a python package that can be imported from other python code, I just need it to be executable from a shell.
compiled programs
Similarly, suppose we have some C++ program. Here we have some additional build dependencies; i.e. a C++ compiler. I assume the build script would involve compiling the code to produce a binary executable.
Whether it's compiled or interpreted, I imagine something would have to be done with the compiled binary (e.g. put it somewhere in the path) or the interpreted script (e.g. create a wrapper launch script for it somewhere in the path) so conda knows that these should be placed in the path of the environment in which my package is installed.
TLDR;
How does one create a conda package out of code of an arbitrary language that is supposed to be executable from a shell (as opposed to imported from python)?