When juggling with multiple projects and workstreams each of which has a disparate set of dependencies, it is a good idea to isolate your work environments. This not only keeps everything clean and organized, it also makes switching between different projects easier and in general is a good programming practice.
To Create an isolated python environent in anaconda.
conda info --envs #Lists all available environments
#Create Environment
#The ‘-y’ flag essentially tells the command line to say ‘yes’ to all of the prompts that follow
conda create --name your_env_name python=3.7 -y
The create command automatically loads all available packages, if you want only a subset you could specify them in the command line as arguments as follows:
conda create --name your_env_name python=3.7 scipy=0.15.0 astroid babel
If you want all packages that are in the base anaconda, you could simply create a clone of the base environment as follows:
conda create --name your_env_name --clone base
If you need to install the environment in a different directory location, you have the following two options:
You can cd into the directory you want to create the environment in and use:
conda create --prefix=your_env_name python=3.7
OR specify the path explicitly as follows:
conda create --prefix=C:/users/.../your_directory/your_env_name python=3.7
To activate this environment you need to use the whole path
activate C:/users/.../your_directory/your_env_name
To avoid this you can run the following which will add the path to the .condarc file so that you can activate it with just the name.
conda config --append envs_dirs C:/users/.../your_directory/
activate your_env_name
You could also create an environment using a YAML File, see:
https://towardsdatascience.com/getting-started-with-python-environments-using-conda-32e9f2779307
#Activate environment
conda activate your_env_name
#deactivate environment
conda deactivate
#Remove Environment --all flag is necessary to remove all packages associated
conda remove --name your_env_name --all
If you get a permission error when trying to remove an environment especially if you are on macOS 10.14 Mojave, run the following in your terminal and then try to remove the environment. You are basically deleting all the .app files from the bin folder in the environment.
cd ~/anaconda3/envs/your_env_name/bin
ls *.app
rm -rf *.app
conda update -n your_env_name --all --yes
If you want to Run Jupyter Notebooks using the jupyter notebook command.
You might have to install the following before you can get it to work.
conda install jupyter
conda install nb_conda
conda install ipykernel