Anaconda export Environment file

Question

I can't find anything in the conda specs which allow you to export an environment file without the prefix: ... line. However, as Alex pointed out in the comments, conda doesn't seem to care about the prefix line when creating an environment from file.

With that in mind, if you want the other user to have no knowledge of your default install path, you can remove the prefix line with grep before writing to environment.yml.

conda env export | grep -v "^prefix: " > environment.yml

Either way, the other user then runs:

conda env create -f environment.yml

and the environment will get installed in their default conda environment path.

If you want to specify a different install path than the default for your system (not related to 'prefix' in the environment.yml), just use the -p flag followed by the required path.

conda env create -f environment.yml -p /home/user/anaconda3/envs/env_name

Note that Conda recommends creating the environment.yml by hand, which is especially important if you are wanting to share your environment across platforms (Windows/Linux/Mac). In this case, you can just leave out the prefix line.

The easiest way to save the packages from an environment to be installed in another computer is:

$ conda list -e > req.txt

then you can install the environment using

$ conda create -n <environment-name> --file req.txt

if you use pip, please use the following commands: reference https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/reference/pip_freeze/

$ env1/bin/pip freeze > requirements.txt
$ env2/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt

• Linux

  conda env export --no-builds | grep -v "prefix" > environment.yml

• Windows

  conda env export --no-builds | findstr -v "prefix" > environment.yml

---

Rationale: By default, conda env export includes the build information:

$ conda env export
...
dependencies:
  - backcall=0.1.0=py37_0
  - blas=1.0=mkl
  - boto=2.49.0=py_0
...

You can instead export your environment without build info:

$ conda env export --no-builds
...
dependencies:
  - backcall=0.1.0
  - blas=1.0
  - boto=2.49.0
...

Which unties the environment from the Python version and OS.

1. First activate your conda environment (the one u want to export/backup)

conda activate myEnv

2. Export all packages to a file (myEnvBkp.txt)

conda list --explicit > myEnvBkp.txt

3. Restore/import the environment:

conda create --name myEnvRestored --file myEnvBkp.txt

First activate your Conda environment (Below, myenv is the supposed name of the environment).

conda activate myenv

Then you just need to run this command

conda env export > environment.yml

Note that you could replace environment.yml with any other filename of your choice.

I find exporting the packages in string format only is more portable than exporting the whole conda environment. As the previous answer already suggested:

$ conda list -e > requirements.txt

However, this requirements.txt contains build numbers which are not portable between operating systems, e.g. between Mac and Ubuntu. In conda env export we have the option --no-builds but not with conda list -e, so we can remove the build number by issuing the following command:

$ sed -i -E "s/^(.*\=.*)(\=.*)/\1/" requirements.txt 

And recreate the environment on another computer:

conda create -n recreated_env --file requirements.txt 

For me the procedure given by Conda worked:

https://conda.io/projects/conda/en/latest/user-guide/tasks/manage-environments.html#sharing-an-environment

But only if executed in an anaconda prompt/ console.

VSCode terminal only generated a yml-file with a path to my environment, but no explicit list of packages in the dependencies.