Error: 'conda' can only be installed into the root environment

Question

I am getting the following error when I try to install the python package seaborn:

conda install --name dato-env seaborn
Error: 'conda' can only be installed into the root environment

This, of course, is puzzling because I am not trying to install conda. I am trying to install seaborn.

This is my setup. I have 3 python environments:

• dato-env
• py35
• root

I successfully installed seaborn previously (with the command conda install seaborn), but it installed in the root environment (and is not available to my iPython notebooks which are using the dato-env).

I tried to install seaborn in the dato-env environment so that it would be available to my iPython notebook code, but I keep getting the above error saying that I must install conda in the root environment. (conda is installed in the root environment)

How do I successfully install seaborn into my dato-env?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Edit:

> conda --version
conda 4.0.5
> conda env list
dato-env              *  /Users/*******/anaconda/envs/dato-env
py35                     /Users/*******/anaconda/envs/py35
root                     /Users/*******/anaconda

Answer 1

If you clone root you get conda-build and conda-env in your new environment but afaik they shouldn't be there and are not required outside root provided root remains on your path. So if you remove them from your non-root env first your command should work. For example, I had the same error when trying to update anaconda but did not get the error doing it this way:

source activate my-env
conda remove conda-build
conda remove conda-env
conda update anaconda

See this thread for alternative and background: https://groups.google.com/a/continuum.io/forum/#!topic/anaconda/PkXOIqlEPCU

Answer 2

Copy root environment to env1.

conda create --name env1 --clone root

Activate your environment.

source activate env1

Remove some conda packages which have to be in root environment.

conda remove conda
conda remove conda-build
conda remove conda-env

Then, You can anything like this.

conda update --all

Answer 3

I was able to replicate the problem for a number of different packages. The error only occurs when I tried to install packages in envs created using the conda create --clone option and not those created from scratch.